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To round off this review, we will run some advanced tests on the NEC ND-4550A. These tests are: 'Sheep Test", protected audio discs and some special disc tests.

The 'Sheep Test":

 For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called sheep test? That's because the logo of the first 1 to 1 copy program called CloneCD is a sheep. When looking at supported writers, you will notice that the feature list has sheep to indicate if a feature is supported or not. In this case we are interested in the writer's ability to backup/write weak sectors. Also called: 'Correct EFM encoding of regular bit-patterns".

• No sheep: Can't backup any Safedisc 2 versions without the help of software tricks
• 1 Sheep: Can backup Safedisc 2 up to version 2.4x without software tricks
• 2 Sheep: Can backup Safedisc 2, including version 2.5x
• 3 Sheep: Can write all possible weak sectors, few if any writers could do this.

One of our forum moderators Womble, has written a guide concerning the 'Sheep Test" that can be found here.

In the screenshot below taken from CloneCD, we see the NEC ND-4550A supports everything.

The NEC ND-4550A supports DAO-RAW recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the NEC ND-4550A is a 'Two Sheep Burner", but it however failed to write the Safedisc V2.90 and Sheep3 tests.

Copy protected Audio:

For our protected audio test, we used the Exact Audio Copy program. We inserted the protected audio discs and if the drive was able to recognize the disc we tried to extract the music tracks to the hard drive. First let us look at the discs we had available for this test: 

Celine Dion: A New Day Has Come; protected with key2audio version 3.

Herbert Gé¶nemeyer: Mensch - This disc is protected with Cactus Datashield 200.0.4 .3(build 12b)

And Michelle: Leben!; protected with Cactus Datashield 200.5.1.91 - 5.10.090.

Results:

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the NEC ND-4550A, we used the over-burning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed.

CD-R:

For this test we used an Infiniti Professional Compax 99min/900mb CD-R. (Thanks to Medea International (UK) for providing the disc).

According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn around 92 minutes.

To test if the NEC ND-4550A is capable to read overburned CD-Rs, we used a 90:10 minutes CD-R:

As we can see for the picture above the NEC ND-4550A had no problems reading the 90:10 minutes CD-R.

DVD+R/-R:

We also tried to overburn DVD+R/-R media:

According to Nero CD-DVD Speed this function is not supported on DVD+R/-R media by the NEC ND-4500A.

This concludes our NEC ND-4550A review, let us head on to the last page to read our conclusion…