Ugh, I love yet hate this forum at the same time! (Mostly love, but still....)

I have upwards of 300 CD's ripped in FLAC format via my NEC ND-3520 drive, and I am pretty happy with my music collection.

Then I come across a post on this damn (kidding, really) forum that tells me that my drive may be at fault for not correcting many of my errors, and may sometimes not even display in my EAC logs that the errors have been detected.

So do I have to buy a new, more expensive CD drive to get 1) Better rips, 2) Faster rips (badly scratched CD's take a few days to do), 3) So that the rips that do have errors will actually be reported as having errors. Or can I just assume that my music is ok? I just need some advice as to what I should do here... Thanks all.

No need for a more expensive drive ... a cheap LiteOn DVD-ROM will do just fine ;-)

But is my entire flac collection as good as crap though? What is the community's opinion on this one?

I assume you have listened to your flacs at least once, not ? If you didn't encounter any audible glitches then your collection is probably allright.
Anyway, re-ripping 300 cd's with a decent drive (any newer one will do, older NECs and LGs are known to be crappy) doesn't seem to be a big task.

(Tagging and categorizing yes, but you can copy that data from the original rips)

So a newer drive would help me rip at faster than 0.0 and help reduce my read/sync errors in EAC?

My suggestions:

1) Listen. Any of them sounds crap? Then re-rip only the crap-sounding ones.

2) Follow JeanLuc's suggestion: Get a LiteOn drive.

3) Rip using EAC.

If you're paranoid, re-rip everything using EAC burst-mode test & copy (I forgot the actual name). It's fast and quite safe. I think.

Edit: Newer drives may not reduce the read errors; but they usually report C1/C2 errors properly to EAC.

Thanks much for your replies thus far guys, and I think those suggestions sound like very good ideas.

Am I correct in saying that a newer drive would help me rip at a reasonable rate, along with reducing audible errors if they were to occur (along with the only potentially accurate read/sync errors in EAC)?

edit: I am posting too fast, lots of good replies between me hitting "reply" and "submit", so sorry for redundancy...

I'm the not-so-proud owner of an NEC drive as well, and I indeed made the experience myself that its ability to create bit-perfect copies is not too reliable. Even in secure mode AccurateRip (an EAC plugin) rarely reported 1 or 2 tracks of an entire album not having been ripped perfectly, although my Pioneer drive didn't have any troubles at correctly copying the same albums, even in burst mode. But a large plus of the NEC burner compared to the Pioneer drive is its ability to completely ignore all available copy protection mechanisms found on my CD collection.

If I were you I wouldn't get any headaches concerning the question whether your rips are ok. A copy that's not bit-perfect doesn't implicitly have to be unusable, in fact I made the experience that most of the NEC thing's so-called erronous copies weren't distinguishable from the sources at all, making them perfect rips as well, hence I often didn't waste any time to re-rip them using the Pioneer drive. Simply keep listening to your audio collection as you always did, if you stumbled across audible clicks/cracks during playback you could dig up the source CD and check whether the click was audible there as well. If that was the case, you just had to rip the CD again, but with AccurateRip installed on your machine in order to make sure that the drive wouldn't rip garbage once more.


Uncheck "Allow speed reduction during extraction" in the "Offset/Speed" tab of the drive's options. Although this setting increases the chances to correct errors it's useless in conjunction with the NEC drive because it refuses spinning up again. At least mine doesn't, yours seems to have the same problem.

If you have ripped with Secure mode without C2 pointers enabled, then your rips are fine(but not 100% secure though) or if you have used burst mode with test & copy and gotten CRC OK. If you have ripped with C2 pointers enabled, then for the most of the time your rips are also fine, but your drive dosen't have the most accurate C2 pointer implementation, so some errors can go unnoticed(can also without C2, though). According to cdrinfo.com, then your drive has gotten a C2 pointer accuracy score of between 96.6% and 98.1%, which is alittle low, but not totally bad either(but some errors will go unoticed).

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Sp...14&PageId=2

I did do my rips with C2 correction disabled.

Then you have nothing to worry about Your rips are just as fine as if they had been ripped with an expensive Plextor which also used no C2, as long as the log said no errors occured. The result is though never 100% though, because of consistent errors.

That is reassuring at least, but it is extremely rare for me to get none of my CD's with errors (I am assuming we are talking about the EAC logs here) on them. Would a LiteOn (et al) reduce the amount of errors encountered?

WTF? I can't believe that's true. Can you explain that in more detail? I thought secure is secure.

Yes, i mean the EAC log or status report. Yes, if you got yourself a drive with better error correction capabilities(i'm not talking about C2 pointer support here, but good CIRC capabilities), then you would get fewer errors reported on those hard to rip discs which gives errors in EAC, than you would by using a drive with mediocre error recovery.

So the general recommendation is... get a better (liteon, perhaps? any recommendations from newegg?) drive, re-rip any discs that have an audible problem in them, and just rip the new ones with the new drive? Anyone want to confirm or deny this for me? And thanks everyone, I really do love this forum!

Even the secure mode isn't 100% reliable, especially if being used in conjunction with a drive that features feeble error correction performance, just like my NEC burner. EAC simply instructs the drive to repeatedly read the suspicious data and statistically analyses which results are the best ones (based on greynol's first reply in this topic). But due to error correction being the drive's task, secure ripping isn't of any help if that stupid NEC thing constantly fails at cleanly reading the problematic track.

Edit:



I can't confirm this, in my opinion it's a waste of good money. If you stumble across audible errors, rip the erronous track with the same drive again. The above-mentioned AccurateRip should be of good help determining whether the drive does a better job at its second attempt. Switching to ripping methods other than secure mode, e.g. burst or fast mode, might sometimes bring up more accurate results (just as mentioned in the note that pops up if you hover the mouse over burst mode in the "Extraction Method" tab).

I understand that, it just takes a few days to do some CD's, and I just got a new batch to do, so it is taking over my comp horribly... I could really do with an upgrade... thanks for your input though, I don't know what I will do yet.

I have a strange issue with my NEC ND-4551A. It appears that this drive hides errors instead of reporting them. I have an RW disc where somebody had put a nasty fingerprint on. I did perform writing onto the damaged area. And instead of errouneous playback, all the problem samples were interpolated and I would not have found out there were errors if I didn't knew it. (I did a bytewise compare and the rest of the affected file was bit identical.)

My other CD drive Samsung SW-248B played back that disc with errors.

I'm not sure it is a good thing that the NEC is doing.