I thought this was a fluke on one of my cds at first, but now I have found it in three different tracks that I have ripped with EAC. Sometimes when playing back a ripped track, the channels seem to swap during playback, and usually swap back. Sometimes several times in the same song. This has happened on both songs that EAC has reported errors on, and songs with no errors. Other than this problem, the Sony drive has been able to recover 100% of errors on my worst cds - including one a Plextor couldn't read. I'm wondering if the "c2 error correction" for this drive is bunk.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

Here's my ripping setup:
AMD 1200
KM266 motherboard
WinXP Pro SP2 (some tracks were ripped on SP1)
M-Audio Revolution 7.1
Playback with iTunes 4.5, WMP 10, Foobar2000 0.83 (all same result)

Used drive : SONY CD-RW CRX320E Adapter: 1 ID: 0
Read mode : Secure with C2, accurate stream, disable cache
Read offset correction : 0
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No

I will post back with my exact EAC and LAME versions later.

Does it happen with WAV files or some other format? IIRC somewhere on this forum there were posts about such a problem with alpha/beta version of some lossy codec...
Of course it wouldn't hurt if you tried to re-rip those songs with C2 disabled and caching prevention enabled.

EAC 0.95pb2
LAME 3.96 (not sure about beta/alpha specifier)

I'll search around for that thread you're mentioning. I wouldn't be surprised if its the encoder.

I remember vaguely reading the pop up help in EAC (don't have access to it right now) for the option to swap channels that there are some old drives that do swap channels back and forth, but that they are very rare. Seems unlikely though that your Sony should suffer that, suppose it is quite new?

Here is the post I was talking about. It's about new experimental version of aoTuV OggVorbis encoder, and since it turned up to be a false alarm and you're using LAME, it's not the case.
Did you try to rip to the WAV file (without any encoding) and see if then the problem is still there?

There's a "Swap channels" option in EAC (Drive options... Drive tab), but AFAIK it affects the whole ripping process (it swaps channels for the whole song). When you keep mouse-cursor over that option there's a pop-up help saying that some drives may swap channels even in the middle of ripping, so it may be your drive indeed.