Aopen vs Toshiba - Page 7

For the test procedure we used three audio discs with different audio copy protections. The ripping process performed for all protected Audio discs was performed 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 easily bypassed by the reader, while the Key2Audio contains a second session, causing problems for readers when trying 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 click/skips.

All drives recognized up to the 13th Audio track of CDS200 disc,

and with the "Retrieve Native TOC" option removed the 13th Data track.

The test results are shown in the following table:

Neither of the two drives managed to play both of the tested discs. Key2Audio protection was easier for both drives while CDS200 was not. The Toshiba drive cannot recognize the disc while the AOpen recognized the contents of the disc but the ripping process was too slow for us to wait :-)

• 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 connected to specific chipset weaknesses.