Some folks I've seen saying that drives that ONLY do CD ripping and burning (no DVD capabilities) are, in general, better for CD ripping than drives that also have DVD capabilities.

Has anyone found this to be true beyond a doubt, or is it just heresay?

If true, what are the best CD-ripping drives you can recommend? I've been using a Plextor PX716SA for most of my ripping needs, but some say that Plextor's CD-only drives are better for CD rips. Others stand by NEC.

In your dream-system, what would you use for CD ripping/burning, and DVD ripping/burning, respectively?

- Tim

There's no correlation. It's based on the assumption that burning capabilities must somehow "downgrade" the reading capabilities of a drive, which is bullshit.

If you want a good drive for CD ripping only don't make the mistake and limit your search to CD-readers only. Look at the results and not at the drives support for writing/DVD.

Btw, use the search this has been asked many times here at HA.org. And you might also want to check club.cdfreaks.com that site deals with optical drives only.

For badly scratched CD's I use my old Liteon CDRW drive, which are INCREDIBLY better getting matched test/copy results than my Plextor PX-708A and NEC DVDRW drives.

odyssey, I second that! Old Lite-on CDRW drives are awesome rippers as well as burners! I have never had better results on other drives!

how do you know that its better because of test and copy? maybe its better at just getting consistant errors???

You could always rip it with multiple times with different drives and see if the result is the same, although that's not really pracitcal for day to day use. It would be feasible to test a drive though.

Thanks all, and especially Fandango, for your thoughts on the subject. I'm still interested if it's just a myth -- funny, most people say it's not, but the people whos say it IS a myth sound like they know what they're talking about, and are quite convincing.

Oh well... more research!

- Tim

the only way to test if it is better is for someone to test more than two drives with a known test cd and compare the results under the same test procedure.

In fact spoon has done this.

check his technology preview out for dbpoweramp r12 ripper. I just bought the plextor 708a and it has dvd burning and came out on top with the other drives he tested. Is that what your looking for?

Perfect is perfect. Some CDs are not able to be ripped perfectly, period. Most CDs, if in half-decent shape, are able to be ripped perfectly, period. There is a middle category where some rippers are more capable than others. If you're dealing with new or like-new CDs, the ripper you use is almost insignificant, because you'll never run into anything that would require ripper capability. Most modern optical drives will allow perfect rip results.

Perhaps others have different stories, but in my ripping experience, I haven't found too many CDs (probably on the order of less than a percent) that will rip correctly in one drive and not in another. They usually work perfectly or have errors.

For CD burning, I have tested it with many different CDR media. I used KProbe2. I have never seen a drive before that would burn ANY CDR disc you throw at it and with low C1 error count and offcourse no C2 errors.
As for the CD ripping... I have never, ever had an inaccurate rip with that drive (using EAC + AccurateRip).
Proof enough?

Yep, using tools like kprobe2 (on Linux) or Plextools and the popular Nero CD-DVD Speed (for Windows), is the best way for a home user to test the quality of a "burn".

But unfortunately only Plextor drives and some LiteOn drives are able to submit the C1 and C2 error counts. But professional test equipment for CD/DVDs costs several thousand dollars/euros, so you can be lucky when you have a drive that supports this nice extra.

When it comes to CD ripping, any ripping tool with sophisticated error detection will tell you whether a rip is going smooth or not. And as Canar said, if an Audio CD is ok, then any CD drive will rip it perfectly. But as many Audio CDs come with a kind of copy-protection that is based on intentional errors, a tolerant CD reader is important.

As I said, if you don't want to test out many drives for yourself, go check out www.cdfreaks.com, it's a community dedicated to everything that has something to do with optical drives, they test blank medias as well as drives.

As for the folks that claim certain kinds of drives are better for this and that than others: it's true to some degree that nowadays there are some drives that are horrible at reading scratched or copy-protected CDs. Whether this was intentional by the manufacturers or whether it's because that today other qualities are more important (speed/burning/support for media formats), I don't know. But it's a fact that there are very good drives out there for reading purposes, and of course those drives will always stand out and be remembered, even when they are out of production... this might also lead to the impression that in the older days there were better drives for Audio CD reading manufactured than today.

Personally I'd rather look out for a "new" drive that's good at burning even the newest media (DVD-RAM might be interesting) and which is also good at reading CDs/CDDAs/DVDs and maybe HD-DVDs/Bluray, too, instead of having 2 or more drives in my PC or maybe even buying an old piece of junk off from ebay because it is said to be an excellent ripper.