I understand that EAC does its best to make perfect copies of your cds, scratched or not, and it does a damn good job at it. But the rip speeds I am getting seem a bit low. Not intolerable, but not ideal. Fairly new to EAC and high quality ripping, so please, bear with me.

I have a Plextor 708a (advertised 40x read speed), latest firmware installed, DMA turned on in Windows for the device. No matter how pristine or scratched my disc is, it never rips at above 4.0X. Usually hovers more around 3.8X. Is this normal for EAC to do what it does best, or could I possibly have wonky settings in EAC that're slowing things down? To configure EAC, I used the Coaster Factory tutorial, so whatever is there are probably my EAC settomgs. I used to use iTunes for ripping/encoding before I learned about the joy that is EAC + lame/flac and it ripped at about 20-25X consistently. If the rip was on a good disc, there was no audible difference between an iTunes and EAC rip (assuming the bitrates were the same, of course).

Any answers or suggestions welcome and appreciated. Take care.

I found that on a Plextor Premium EAC usually does about 10x. I did find once that an application had set the read speed very low and EAC handn't put it back up to maximum. Go and look in Plextools to see the the maximum read speed has been set to something less than the maximum the drive is capable of.

I have just ripped a CD in burst mode with my Plextor PX-708A. This was using Test and Copy and I also always compare my results with the accurate rip database. The Test and Copy CRCs all matched but unfortnately this disc doesn't exist in the accuraterip database yet (well, it does now ). My CRCs all match so I'm happy that this was a secure extraction.

The rip started at 10x and finished at 36x. The disc was ripped twice (test and copy, remember) in under 5 minutes.

I believe secure mode is a waste of resources with a good drive and clean disc. I believe that secure mode should only be used once burst mode test and copy has failed.

Going to try burst and fast mode on the same pristine (seriously, no marks - when i bought it I ripped it lossless, burned a backup for the car, compressed it to mp3 alt preset extreme for itunes, and stored it away) disc and post results. I'll also turn off secure mode and post results. Plextools Pro said the read speed was set to 32x, so I changed it to 40x.

Here we go!

...

Fast mode only, secure off: tracks start at about 9x, end at an average of 22x. the last track is a long one, and ended at 29x. The average time on this disc per song, estimated, is about 4:10. Great results! Note that on each track, read speed was reset back to ~9x per track.

Burst mode only, secure off: Started at 9x, sustained rip speed after about 3 tracks was average, I'm guessing, around 29x. Read speeds did not reset per track in this mode. The last track finished at 33.9x. sexuh!!

I think burst is the way to go, unless I'm ripping a marred disc, then it's secure mode and my normal 3.9x read speed.

Thanks guys! Both of these rip speeds are amazing!!

Question: does plextools do anything neat that I'm missing? I changed the max read speed, but couldn't find any other useful tweaks. It also wouldn't change my DVD read speed. Do I have to have a DVD in the drive to set that? I had a CD in the drive when I set the read speed to 40x. Also, I know plextools rips, burns, encodes, etc, but I don't plan to be using it for that - just drive tweaking. Also, do I have to load plextools and check/reset settings every time I wanna rip? It seems that if I reset the read speed to 40x, it automatically resets it to 32x when I reload plextools. I did File->Save Info, but it just writes a syslog.txt file in my appdata folder.

You will probably only see something near 40x on a disc that is of excellent quality and has data that fills the entire disc. The drive read speed is at maximum when the read head is at the disc outer edges.

You must use Test And Copy and obtain matching CRCs to be sure your rip was OK in burst mode. Otherwise there is no sense in using EAC as it's simply behaving the same as any other ripping software.

Thanks for the pointer. I have ripped 5 cds in burst so far and no errors, but they were all in nearly mint condition. But from here on out, I'll definitely use test & copy.

Thanks everyone! All this ripping after my catostrophic drive failure is a hell of a lot more pleasant now!

If you used burst mode and did not use Test and Copy you do not know if those first 5 were without error. Test and Copy and a manual check of the CRCs is the only way you can know.