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 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 Pioneer DVR-111 supports all the required features.

The Pioneer DVR-111 supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the Pioneer DVR-111 is a 'Two Sheep Burner", but could not cope with safedisc 2.90 or our Sheep 3 test files.

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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:

From our 'copy protected audio disc" tests, we would have to conclude the Pioneer DVR-111 is a good drive for ripping protected Audio CD's

Overburning:

CD-R 900MB (99 minute) over-burn test:

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

From past experience with the Pioneer drives, we expected the above error. We then tried to create a disc with a capacity of 91:21.25 to test if the drive could handle discs of up to 90 minutes and beyond.

The Pioneer DVR-111 successfully created our test disc. We then tested to see if the Pioneer DVR-111 could read our created disc. As you can see from the screenshot below, the Pioneer DVR-111 had no problems in reading our created disc.

DVD+R over-burn test (5000MB):

For this test we used a Plextor branded Taiyo Yuden 16x DVD+R media. (Thanks to Plextor for providing this media)

The Pioneer DVR-111 reported no support for overburning our DVD+R media.

DVD-R over-burn test (5000MB):

For this test we used a Infiniti branded MCC03RG20 16x DVD+R media. (Thanks to SVP UK for providing this media)

The Pioneer DVR-111 reported no support for overburning our DVD-R media.

Mini DVD-R discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Pioneer DVR-111 is capable of writing and reading mini DVD-R discs with a capacity of 30 minutes/1.46 GB.

The Verbatim MINI DVD-R was manufactured by Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation. Thanks to SVP UK for providing this media.

Now it was time to see if the Pioneer DVR-111 could write our MINI DVD-R disc.

The Pioneer DVR-111 had no problems writing our MINI DVD-R disc. Now let's see if the drive can read back the disc.

The Pioneer DVR-111 successfully read back our MINI DVD-R disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Pioneer DVR-111 would read a Video-CD, for this test we created a Video-CD with Nero Burning ROM 6, and used NERO CD-DVD Speed to read the disc back. Below is our result:

The Pioneer read our test VCD disc at its maximum read speed of 40x, as we can see, there was a slowdown during the read process, but this was most likely caused by an error in our test disc.

This concludes our Pioneer DVR-111 review, let's head on to the last page to read our conclusion…