For this test procedure we used three audio discs with different audio copy protection schemes. The ripping process for all protected Audio discs was carried out with Exact Audio Copy v0.9beta5.

The tested protected Audio discs were:

• Sony's Key2Audio from "Celine Dion - New Day Has Come"
• Cactus Data Shield 200 from "Natalie Imbruglia - White Lilies Island"

The Cactus Data Shield 200 contains artificial errors that are not easy to bypass with a reader, while the Key2Audio contains a second session, causing problems for readers when they attempt to read the Table Of Contents (TOC).

The tested tasks are:

• Recognition of the inserted disc (Yes/No)
• Ripping all wavs (with EAC's Burst Mode) to the hard disk with copy&compare function.
• Listening to the produced wavs for any clicks/skips.

The AOpen DUW1608/ARR DVD Burner recognized up to the 12th Audio track of the CDS200 disc,

and with the "Retrieve Native TOC" option removed, it then recognized the 13th Data track.

The test results are shown in the following table:

The AOpen DUW1608/ARR DVD Burner could recognize and playback Key2Audio protected discs. Ripping with EAC was not possible though. CDS200 protection was not a problem.

• Cactus Data Shield 200.0.4 - 3.0 build 16a (Aiko Katsukino - The Love Letter)

This is a "special" CDS200 build, since it doesn't contain any artificial errors during the ripping process. Most problems occur when trying to write the ripped wav files, since the produced CD-R disc contains C2 and CU errors! This "problem" is rumored to be associated with specific chipset weaknesses.

We ripped the disc contents with EAC and burned the produced wav with the latest Nero version as AudioCD+CD-Text. The burned media was checked for C1/C2 errors with PlexTools using the Plextor PX-712A (firmware v1.05).

• C1C2 Error rate from PleXWriter PX-712A (8X CLV reading speed)

• BETA/Jitter Error rate with the PleXWriter PX-712A

The C1/C2 error graphs show that the drive did not manage to produce a 100% error free disc. There were a couple of C2 spikes in the graph and a CU spike, meaning there were uncorrectable errors on the disc. Nevertheless, we then tried to extract all the wav files with the Plextor PX-712A and PlexTools DAE with Error Correction 5th Level enabled:

No errors were reported after extracting all files, but as was previously mentioned, the copy was not 100% successful. The produced disc contains C2 and CU errors, as these were reported by Plextools software!