When ripping the audio tracks of Quake II I noticed an error between the two rips I had made with my 2 drives (a Lite-On dvd, and an LG cdrw) with EAC's compare wav function, the odd thing is it did it's usual state no errors on ripping.

The LG adds 322 more samples of non-zero audio at the very end of the last track as seen:



These results are repeatable on both drives - different rips from the same drive are identical and differ from those of the other drive in the same way.

Is this a problem, and is EAC at fault for not reporting it?

If you have set up the read offset correction correctly, and both drives have a positive offset correction value, and neither of them are capable of reading lead-out, this is as expected.

If a drive has a positive offset correction value and can't read lead-out, it will always cut off the last few samples (the number of samples is the offset) of the last track of the CD. There is no way to retreive those samples with that drive.

Since your drives most certainly will have different offsets, they will cut off a different amount of samples, and hence the ripped track won't be identical... Best thing would be to use the drive with the smallest offset.

Usually this is not a big problem since most CD:s fade to silence on the last track, and hence often the missing samples are silent or at least near-silent. From your graph you can see that the samples amplitude are less than 100. I guess this should be close enough to silence... (max is 32767)

Do a search and you will find more info about this.