detail information

 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 Plextor PX-760A supports all the required features.

The Plextor PX-760A supports DAO-RAW96 recording mode, which basically means, it should be able to write uncorrected data and sub-channel data.

As we can see from the table the Plextor PX-760A is a 'No Sheep Burner".

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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 Plextor PX-760A 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).

The Plextor PX-760A reported an maximum overburn capacity of 101:38.53. We then setup CD-Speed to overburn a disc with slightly less than the maximum, 100:54.50 to be exact.

The Plextor PX-760A successfully created our test disc. We then tested to see if the Plextor PX-760A could read our created disc. As you can see from the screenshot below, the Plextor PX-760A had no problems in reading our created disc.

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

For this test we used a DataWrite branded RICOH JPNR01 DVD+R media. (Thanks to SVP UK for providing this media)

The Plextor PX-760A reported an overburn capacity of 4614Mbytes for our DVD+R media.

We set CD-Speed to burn a disc with a  capacity of 4606Mbytes. The Plextor PX-760A successfully created our test DVD+R media. Now let's see if the Plextor PX-760A can read our test disc.

The Plextor PX-760A had no problems in reading our test disc.

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 Plextor PX-760A reported no support for overburning our DVD-R media.

GigaRec:

One of the nice features of the Plextor Premium series drives is that they support GigaRec. But what is GigaRec? GigaRec lets you change the recording capacity of a standard CD-R disc from 70 percent up to 130 percent of its standard capacity.

GigaRec enable/setup screen

First of all we enabled GigaRec and set the (rate) to 1.3x

In this test we used PlexTools Professional XL and an Infiniti CD-R media rated at 700MB (80 minutes), and attempted to write 900.27MB of data to the disc with GigaRec enabled.

Write dialog

We then set the options for our burn; GigaRec only allows 8x maximum writing speed.

Burn completed successfully

As we can see from the above screenshot, our burn completed successfully at 8x. We then tried to read the disc with the Plextor PX-760A.

Mini DVD-R discs:

In this section we are going to test if the Plextor PX-760A 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 Plextor PX-760A could write our MINI DVD-R disc.

The Plextor PX-760A had no problems writing our MINI DVD-R disc. Now let's see if the drive can read back the disc.

The Plextor PX-760A successfully read back our MINI DVD-R disc.

Video-CD disc:

For our final test we wanted to see how the Plextor PX-760A 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 Plextor PX-760A read our test VCD disc at its maximum read speed of 40x without any problems.

This concludes our Plextor PX-760A review, let's head on to the last page to read our conclusion…