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Now that we've taken a look at how well the Plextor drive can handle data protection it's time to see how well it does with protected audio discs. Audio discs are protected more and more and so it's important a drive can read these protections. For the tests we used Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and PlexTools. For more information on how to handle copy-protected audio discs read this thread on our Audio forum.

Key2Audio version 2:

The first protection we're going to take a look at is Key2Audio developed by Sony DADC. The disc we're using is 'Shakira: Laundry Service' protected with version 2 of the Key2Audio protection. On the front of the CD-cover we can read the text 'will not play on PC/MAC'. For more information on Key2Audio please visit www.key2audio.com.

We first started EAC, inserted the disc and closed the tray. We waited until the CD-contents were displayed. As you can see the Plextor PX-W4824TU drive can recognize the disc's contents and we see that it has 13 audio tracks and one extra (protected) data track:

After selecting all the audio tracks (we of course left the data track alone) we could extract them at full speed to our hard disk without any problems. We of course listened to the extracted tracks and they sounded fine.

Key2Audio version 3:

For the Key2Audio version 3 tests we used an audio disc with the title 'Celine Dion: A new day has come'. On the front of the CD-cover we again find the text 'will not play on PC/MAC'. We fired up EAC and waited until the recorder has recognized the disc. As you can see the Plextor PX-W4824TU drive again has no problems recognizing the disc's contents and we can see that the 'Celine Dion' disc has the same structure as the 'Shakira' disc. There are 17 audio tracks and one (protected) data track:

After selecting all the audio tracks again (we of course left the data track alone) we could extract them at full speed to our hard disk without any problems. The same result as we got with the 'Shakira' disc.

Cactus Data Shield:

For the Cactus Data Shield (CDS) tests we used an audio disc with the title 'Bitte Ein Beat 5' protected with CDS200. On the back of the CD-cover and on the disc itself we can find a small logo mentioning that the disc is copy protected. When inserting the disc in a drive and starting the player we can see that the disc has been protected by Midbar Tech (www.midbartech.com):

We first tried to read the disc with EAC but the Plextor PX-W4824Tu drive showed a very weird looking tracklist as you can see in the screenshot below:

Notice that the tracks are shown completely wrong (wrong length, wrong size, etc) and when we tried to extract the tracks there was an error. Also notice the progress percentage for total progress (639.7%):

Reading with CloneCD and IsoBuster also failed and when we finally thought of giving up we tried the PlexTools software. PlexTools has an interesting feature called 'Enable Single Session'. Because CDS uses two session of which the first session contains the audio and the second session the data, the latter is confusing the drive. Now look what happened when we used EAC again:

The Plextor PX-W4824TU now shows the correct tracklisting! We then tried extracting the audio tracks to see if there were any errors:

This time the entire disc was read without any problems at full speed! We verified our results with the internal Plextor PX-W4824A drive using the PlexTools software and got the exact same results. When the 'Enable Single Session' option was enabled in the PlexTools software the drive showed the correct tracklist and was able to extract all the tracks!

Doc.loc:

Doc.loc is another audio protection and can be recognized by the text 'DOCdata' on the inner ring of the disc. On the back of the CD cover we can read the following text:

"This product features copy protection technology, as we feel the necessity to protect our artists and ourselves from illegal copying; it is intended for use in standard home CD audio players and may not play on other devices, especially computer drives."

Doc.loc is a protection that has been produced by the DOCdata company (www.docdata.com) and when you insert an audio disc that has the Doc.loc protection in a computer drive it will simply keep searching indefinitely because the drive cannot recognize the disc. Let's see if this theory also applies to the Plextor drive. We first inserted the disc in the recorder and waited till the disc had been recognized. This unfortunately didn't happen so we then started EAC and let EAC close the drive's tray:

After about a minute we can see the contents of the disc and we can rip the tracks at full speed without any problems:

Conclusion:

The results we got were perfect. Although we had some problems with the Cactus Data Shield protection this was easily fixed with the PlexTools software. As expected Key2Audio was no problem since we already tested this with our review of the internal Plextor PX-W4824A drive. Finally we've also taken a look at the Doc.loc protection which is quite new here in The Netherlands. The Plextor drive had no problems reading the disc at full speed.

Next up in our Plextor PX-W4824TU review, reading and writing of special discs. We'll be skipping the CD-(M)RW tests and media compatibility tests since we already did those tests in our previous review.