Recently I've decided to give iTunes's AAC encoder a shot. I'm ripping images with EAC and mounting it as an audio CD via daemon tools.

For EAC's detection accuracy, I have selected "secure." My question is this: Is ripping the entire image of a CD equivalent to ripping each track separately via secure mode? Am I going to get a slightly lower quality because I'm ripping the entire image in one fell swoop, or is it exactly the same as individually ripping the tracks?

The quality will be the same.

With track by track rips, you may actually lose info that is in the pregaps (depending on how you have EAC set up).

Excellent... that's exactly what I was hoping to hear.

related to this topic, why do i get different extraction speeds using the 'image and cue sheet' function versus extracting track by track.

i can't seem to get higher than 8.5x using my lite-on 52327s burner compared to finishing at about 13x using track by track extraction.

i have it set up for c2 error correction and am running XP on a AMD Athlon. Are these speeds about right?

( a ) Weird, my drive is slightly faster for an image (no slowdowns between the tracks).
( b ) Yes, such speed is to be expected.

Now, is this using the reported drive speeds, or have you timed it independently?

When ripping an image, the speed will show the average speed over the whole disc. When ripping track by track, this average will reset at the start of each track. Given that read speed is always faster toward the outer edge of the disc, the displayed speed when ripping by image probably will always display a bit below the track-by-track speed, due to averaging. Unless you've verified the time independently of the displayed read speed, I don't think this is anything to worry about.

EDIT: With a TDK-880n and SonyDRU500a on a 3.0P4, I get similar speeds.