i would like to ask whether the ripping speed is a strong factor for the quality of mp3s. i have made the appropriate settings in eac but when i select to rip at 8.0X it rips at 4.0X. anyway. when i select actual speed it rips at any speed. but i think that when the ripping speed is high, the output mp3 quality is worse than the mp3s ripped at low speed. your opinion?

If the rip was error-free, which it should be with EAC in secure mode, it does not matter if you extract at 1X or 52X, the resulting files will be bit-identical (you can test this if you want).
High ripping speed could only be problematic if you use "burst" mode in EAC or other rippers.

yeah, mp3 encoding quality is not related to the rip speed.

And the reason you see 4x when you select 8x is because EAC is reading everything twice.

EAC will rip CDs to Hard disk as PCM waves

then convert it to mp3 using the program you've specified (normally LAME) after ripping

therefore, ripping speed has nothing to do with mp3 encoding at all

another question of the same kind.
even if i make backups of the cds to my hdd and then encode them, the speed with which i transfer the songs to an image file again has nothing to do with the quality of the files right? i do not mean the encoded ones but the transfered ones.