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To round off this review we will run some advanced tests on the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA.

The 'Sheep test":

For this test, we will use the Sheep tests made by Alexander Noé. Why is it called sheep test? That is since the symbol of the first 1 to 1 copy program called CloneCD is a sheep. And 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 could be found here.

In the screenshot below taken from CloneCD v5, we could see that the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA supports every feature in CloneCD:

Pioneer DVR-A08XLA supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it can write uncorrected data and subchannel data.

Drive used to verify that the tests works is Lite-On SOHD-167T. Below are our results from the 'Sheep Tests":

We were quite surprised to find the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA to qualify as a two sheep writer.

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:

Westlife: World of our own is protected with Cactus data shield 100.

Natalie Imbruglias White lilies Island. This disc is protected with Cactus Datashield 200

Shakira: Laundry service, which is protected with Key2Audio version 2.

And finally Celine Dion: A new day has come, that is protected with key2audio version 3

Results:

Unfortunately the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA was unable to read two of our testdiscs.

Overburning:

To test the overburning capabilities of the Pioneer DVR-A08XLA we used the overburning test in Nero CD/DVD-Speed. According to Nero CD/DVD speed the drive can overburn to 90 minutes:

Then we tried to write a 90 minute disc in Nero:

Unfortunately it failed and after some testing we found the maximum possible overburn to be just under 89 minutes. Let's try to read a 99 minutes disc:

Unfortunately it failed when trying to do the seek time tests.

Now, that concludes our Pioneer DVR-A08XLA review, head on to the last page to read our conclusion…