I'm new to this and I just started converting my CD's to MP3's on my Hitachi laptop equipped with an internal CD-ROM. Its a Hitachi 220Fx (PIII-450 MHz)

I've been using CDex and EAC and then settled on Cdex. The first few sounded okay. But then I strted checking them after doing a couple hundred and I noticed that they sounded noticeable slow, similar to what would happen on a turntable if you reduced the pitch.

I also noticed that CD's sounded the same when I played them on the laptop.

At first I though that maybe I had damaged the CD-Rom drive on the laptop. Supposedly certain setting on EAC can do this. But I checked the settings I had had not activated the "paranoia" mode or whatever it is that could kill the cd player.

Then I attached a new, different External CD-Rom drive and I have a same problem - slow pitch on CD's that I play and on MP's ripped from it.

Does anyone have any sense of what could be amiss in this sitaution.

use Easy CD-DA Extrator or the mp3pro codec in nero this schould do it

Using MP3pro doesn't solve anything. Nobody here is recommending it, although it's a decent codec for low bitrate like 64kbps.

Perhaps you can provide somebody here a clip from a song which is very obviously flawed in such a way to your ears?

I'm willing to bet the problem is imagined...

encoding with mp3pro at 96kbps is like encoding with LAME at 192kbps mp3pro is a much superior technology if you analyz your mp3 files with an mp3 analyzer there will be no doubt.

If you're playing CDs digitally then it sounds like the sampling rate clock is too slow. They could have used the wrong crystal resonator for the audio codec IC when designing/building the laptop.

Copy your files over to another computer and play them there. If they play at the correct speed on the other computer then you know that something is wrong with your laptop's audio subsystem.

Encoding with mp3Pro? No comment.

Mp3 analyzer?

You can't judge the overall quality based on frequency analysis graphs. This is a fact. It's been explained many times, so I don't bother now.

Only thing I say now is that you can't say 100% sure from graphs, what ears really hear or don't hear. Psychoacoustics is a very complex issue.

i think he means a spectral analyzer...

This sort of thing can be done with some soundcards (Soundblaster Live for example). You can lower the pitch, speed, or both, of the wave signal. This would probably affect everything played through, for example, winamp.

like EncSpot from www.guerillasoft.com/EncSpot you can get here.