I have a Plextor 708UF (it is an external 708A) and an LG GSA-H21L. They are both configured correctly (read offset of +30 for the PX and +102 for the LG). Both have passed AccurateRip tests (AccurateRip confirmed the offsets).

I am trying to convert my CD collection to WavPack. All went well, but the mentally ill person that I am decided to do the rip on both drives to make sure all rips are really perfect.

It is interesting to have 2 completely differents drives. No one is the best. They react differently to different CDs. But enough babbling....

The real problem is the following... I am trying to rip John Scofield - Quiet. I tried Test&Copy in burst mode and in secure mode on BOTH drives.

The kicker is... the CRCs always match... but when I do a comparison between the different ripping sessions, none match. Not even the ones made with the same drive. I use the MD5 computed by WavPack to do the comparison.

Also, the size of the rips go from 293MB to 308MB. This is crazy...

This did NOT happen on the ~30 CDs I already ripped.

What the... ?!

Maybe the TOC is broken, and one drive uses it while the other gets the correct layout? So there's something like extra data on the end? Perhaps a non-audio block, multimedia stuff?

If you rip to wav, you can compare them with the tool that comes with EAC - it can tell you where the differences are. That might be more informative then the md5. The fact that the CRCs match, suggests that the extra 15MB are all silence...??

If this problem is specific to the CD which you mentioned, it might be related to an odd TOC, as Patsoe said, or some other quirk, e.g. copy protection. The fact that the CRCs match suggests to me that the differences must not be very drastic.

Indeed, use EAC's comparing function and let us know what results you get!

If it is the first or last cd track then perhaps the drives can / cannot overread.

I should have given feedback a little faster. Sorry about it.

I forgot to give a very important information in my first post (that I confirmed later on). I had tried to use a new software which figures out if a CD drive caches audio or not and if so my what amount. The software name is CacheExplorer. It froze trying to analyze my LG GSA-H21L. After that, even after hard rebooting, the drive could not be seen by the ASPI layer. I had to use the "native interface" and this is where all things went AWOL. The thing is, only John Scofield CD Quiet gave those strange results.

Anyway.. since then, I use Plextools XL 3.10 and get perfect rips every time (I rip twice and then compare just to make really sure nothing gets past C2 detection).

So... moral of the story... don't use CacheExplorer and if you have a Plextor drive, well... Plextools isn't bad at all.

Thanks guys.