Hi, I have got two questions regarding EAC.

1. When I used the combined read/write offset method, I was able to burn a music cd which when I did a wav compare to my original pressed cd returned no differences for all the tracks! I extracted the 1st and last track and a few middle ones. I thought that using this offset method should result in lost of data as discussed in the Coaster Factory EAC tutorial. But it is really surprising that neither the 1st nor last tracks shown sample differences. May I know why is it so?

2. I was extracting a brand new original pressed cd and it somehow stopped at one of the tracks for a long time and the error correction status box kept ruuning red along the 1st row. I skipped the track and went back to extract it alone after the rest of the album was done. But surprisingly, there wasn't any error coorection this time?! I also did an image extraction of the album and it returned a 100% track quality. May I know what's the problem?

Heres my specs:
EAC 0.95 Prebeta 5
Nero Aspi 2.0.1.68
TDK 882N DVD Burner (NEC 2510A OEM) Secondary Master.

Running on:
AMD 3200+
Asus Nvidia A7N8X Motherboard.

Thanx

Sounds like a protected CD (and not VERY well protected).
I have seen similar behaviour on protected CDs

If your disc contains tracks that start & end with a number of silent samples larger than your drive's read offset, this is quite normal since EAC (by standard setting) does fill up missing offset samples with silence.

Loss of data will only occcur if the tracks start/end with audio data ...

Hmm. Makes sense... Does that imply my drive supports reading lead-in and lead-out? Cos I really can't explicitly find the specs of lead-in/out readability of my drive. But I checked the "Overread into Lead-in and Lead-out" option under offset tab in Drive option. N in my case does it mean I had made a 100% 1:1 copy of my audio cd?

thanx.

You just lost some original silence, and it was replaced by silence instead. Thus the files are the same, but it's just by chance. If you had lost something else than silence, it would also have been replaced by silence.
2 The first time, your drive encountered an error which made it slow down, and once slowed down it could not read properly, or maybe the fact of having to reread many times prevented it to read properly.
I don't see how this behaviour could be related to protected CDs. The characteristics of protected CDs is to have permanent errors.
AtaqueEG, maybe you got one row of error correction all the time on one drive (normal behaviour of a protected CD) and nothing on another drive.