Hi Guys. Newbie here, so be gentle.

I'm new at this high-end audiophile stuff, and I've recently decided to archive my large CD collection onto my two new 500GB hard drives. The absolute top priority is obtaining the highest possible quality rips of each individual track, followed by the ability to handle copy-protected CDs.

My two drives are an LG GDR8161B DVD-ROM and an LG GCE 8400B CD-RW, which are both about five years old. How do these rate for audio ripping? Good, adequate, bad, complete crap? Do you recommend that I dump them and get new drives, and if so, given the top priority is accurate audio extraction, followed by the ability to handle copy-protected CDs, which do you recommend?

I've heard a lot about the older (not rebadged) Plextor drives. Some say they're the Holy Grail for audio extraction, others say it's all a myth. Which is true? And which models would you recommend (if any)? I'm speaking of internal IDE drives here. If all this stuff about Plextor drives is a complete myth, what other drives in the sub-$100 range would you recommend? Given my needs as outlined above, what are the top currently produced DVD/CD drives in this price range:

For quality of audio extraction (and ability to handle copy-protected CDs)?

For quality of audio CD-burning?

If necessary, I'd be willing to buy two separate drives to fulfill the audio extraction vs audio burning quality issue (if a single drive can't give the highest quality in both areas).

As a newbie at all of this, I'm unsure about a lot of the technical stuff, such as C2 markers, drive caching (is this bad for audio ripping?), etc, so I'll depend on you guys to put me straight on these things.

Phil

If your only concern is audio quality, given the discs you are trying to rip are clean, almost any drive would be sufficient.

Most people would use EAC for audio extraction, as it will help you make a perfect rip. Most disks would have AccurateRip results available, which will be verified upon your rip to make sure it was perfect.

If AccurateRip info does exist for a certain disk, I would use EAC's burst method and make a test/copy rip to make sure two rips are identical. However this might be a problem with copy protected discs that has artificial errors, since. I think a more secure method is to use two drives from different vendor, to make the test and copy on each.

For more problematic, scratched discs and some copy protected, I enable "Drive caches" and "Accurate Stream" and use test/copy to make sure the rip was perfect. C2 detection are not recommended, since it's very unreliable on many drives and also many copy protection methods incorporate fake C2 errors.

I hope I'm not giving out malicious information. Greynol correct me if i'm wrong

Edit: You didn't mention anything about fileformats? Lossless is the way to go for you

I agree with you for the most part.

Telling EAC that your drive caches when its internal test for caching says it doesn't will not improve your drive's ability to extract accurate data. Also, telling EAC that your drive has the Accurate Stream feature allows it to take shortcuts, kind of like telling it to use C2 pointers. Of course the chances that any drive produced in the last seven or eight years doesn't have this feature are extremely slim; and unlike with C2 pointers, telling EAC that your drive has the feature when it doesn't work properly is not as likely to result in errors going undetected.

Regarding matters of copy protection I defer to those who are more knowledgeable.

Isn't there a correlation between the highest in audio quality and exact bit reproduction? If the extracted copy is the same, bit-to-bit, as the original, you should have exact audio reproduction anyway? Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm still at the very early learning stages here).



EAC is what I use at the moment, although I really like what I've been seeing and hearing about dbPowerAmp (which, unlike EAC, is still in development). My only problems with using AccurateRip are that, firstly, I have lots of esoteric/non-mainstream music, so the CDs may not be in the database, and secondly, I tend to rip individual tracks that I like from albums rather than entire albums (does AccurateRip work on an individual track basis?).



Yeah, I have a number of copy protected CDs that I (obviously) haven't been able to copy. I'm very tempted to boycott buying copy protected CDs altogether, but I just gotta have that music. So a foolproof way of extracting copy protected music is high on my list of priorities. Copy protection is EVIL! I don't pirate music, I buy all the CDs, I should be able to backup and listen to them in any way I see fit. I remember reading once that you can bypass copy protection if you have your computer and hi-fi linked - play the CD in your hi-fi and record the audio through your soundcard and into your computer. Dunno if this is possible (would love a step by step guide if it is), or even how good the quality of the recording would be (you'd need a good soundcard). What do you think?



Starting to get a bit technical for me now - I'm only a newbie (but willing to learn). From what I've been reading so far in these forums, I've picked up that C2 detection is a Good Thing and drive caching is a Bad Thing for audio extraction. Maybe I'm misunderstanding altogether. But I do have a few older disks with scratches, and I'd like to get good audio rips from them. So keep the info and tips coming.



Yes, I only rip to lossless these days. I gave up on lossy a while ago (not the way for an audiophile to do a good archive of his music collection), and only use OGG (my favourite lossy format) at very high bitrate and MP3 (if given no other choice) at 320 (the -extreme- setting on Lame) for a couple of my old DAPs that don't have the space (small flash drives) for lossless, or don't support any of the lossless formats. My main DAP, the excellent Cowon iAudio X5 (60GB) supports a wide range of formats, including FLAC and OGG (so it's mostly FLAC on that).

My main music management software on my desktop is the brilliant MediaMonkey, which handles FLAC and OGG among many others. My digital music collection is now about 75% FLAC, with the rest - old MP3s and OGGs - being gradually re-ripped as FLAC, but as yet I've ripped barely 25% of my huge CD collection, so a long way to go yet.

I also use two excellent programs in my job as a DJ at local clubs - Traktor DJ Studio 3 and SAM Party DJ 3. FLAC is fine for playing in Traktor 3, although it can't handle the Vorbis tags (I don't really mind too much - all I need for DJing are the Artist and Track titles, with maybe the Year in the title somewhere). SAM Party DJ doesn't use FLAC, although it's in great demand by the users, and on the list for a future version, so at the moment I'm forced to use WMA Lossless with SAM, which will be dropped as soon as FLAC support is adopted.

I don't like proprietary formats for my music. Open formats all the way.

Phil

Yes. Unless you have crappy hardware, exact bit reproduction is only difficult when a disc is damaged, defective or has copy protection. I'm not including trivial nuance matters such as offsets.

Both programs are still being developed. Hopefully this will continue to be the case.

I already told you the answer was yes.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=529349

I think you mean C2 error information or C2 pointers. With EAC, they aren't a good thing, with dBpowerAMP, they are a good thing.

For EAC it's a bad thing in that caching drives take a lot longer to rip in secure mode. Other programs handle caching differently with less penalty.

By crappy hardware, we're back to my original post in this thread. I'd really like to find out if my LG GDR8161B DVD-ROM and LG GCE8400B CD-RW are crappy hardware, or if they're up to the job. And if not, what drives would be top recommendations as replacements? The "trivial nuance matters" such as offsets are a bit above my newbie head at the moment, so I'll need some help getting my head around that. What exactly are offsets?



Sorry. I thought that EAC had stopped development a while back (maybe I read an erroneous posting somewhere on the net). My bad. But really glad to hear it's still being developed.



Yes, I saw your reply in the other thread after I'd posted the question in this one. Thanks.



OK. Got that. Why are they bad in EAC? I gather I'd have to disable any option for detecting them? I thought I read elsewhere in the forum that it also depends on whether your drive can read C2 pointers. If this is right, where to I find a list of drives that do - is there a FAQ, list, sticky post or something similar here in the HydrogenAudio Forums? I'd like to find out if either or both of my drives can read C2 pointers.



The time penalty in secure mode is the only drawback? That's not so serious, then. I'm much more interested in the quality of the extracted audio, rather than how long it takes to rip.

Phil

Back to the original question. I have probably 20+ different drives. My personal best performer is the Plextor 712.

Real Plextors feature:
-good C2 implementation
-over read lead in/out (required for some copy protected discs and bit perfect rips of first and last track)
-drive cache disabling
-HTOA reading support (thanks greynol)
-over all good engineering and performance

EAC is still being "developed" in that every couple of years there are small updates. Andre has said EAC is in bad need of a complete re-write to handle some significant problems, but he has no interest in doing major work on EAC.

You forgot the ability to read HTOA.

I think "significant problems" is a severe overstatement, but you've already made it clear that you don't like EAC anymore.

@Phil Friel:
check the wiki...
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...C_Drive_Options

I think those drives are probably fine and hopefully the rest of your computer is healthy.

Consistent shifts in time from a standardized reference that vary between different models of drives. They're usually far fewer than 1000 samples and have no bearing on the precision of your rip.

EAC crashes nearly every time I rip discs with major errors. Andre has said that this is a known flaw in EAC and will not be fixed as its at the core of the way EAC works. I would call this a significant problem. Its a good program and its free. But there is a clearly superior alternative in dBpoweramp now.

Your problem is not one that I hear many people complain about, nor is it one that I experience personally, so it's not anything I'm too concerned with.

Without C2 pointers, the difference between dBpowerAMP and EAC from the standpoint of accuracy isn't as cut and dry as you would like people to believe. I find that dBpA is more susceptible to consistent errors and believe this is because it only focuses on one frame of audio at a time, while EAC looks at 27 frames at a time. Raise the number of re-reads beyond the default of 34 and you're likely to get into trouble.

I have run EAC on many different systems and always had stability problems with it. In terms of accuracy, I have no problem with EAC, it is very reliable. However, I do find that dBpoweramp is more efficient at extracting accurate rips (though that may have improved with the latest EAC which I have not spent much time with).

Andre doesn't seem interested revamping his ripping routines so there is no change in accuracy or in efficiency.

Martin recently asked him to do away with performing synchronizing altogether with Accurate Stream-capable drives which would essentially do away with the speed penalty when ripping with caching drives. Hopefully this change wouldn't be very difficult and Andre will be willing to take this on, but use of C2 pointers during re-reads appears to be out of the question.

People have also asked him to automate the ripping process by taking cues from AR results much in the same way that dBpA does. I don't know what chance there is of this happening but am somewhat ambivalent about it. In the realm of what should be doable without an entire overhaul, I'd rather see changes that make the caching penalty go away.

I say overhaul because Andre said he would probably start all over(*) if he were going to implement any major changes and just doesn't feel like spending that kind of time. This is pretty understandable since he isn't developing EAC for money.

(*)I'm guessing he's aware of some issues like what you've experienced.

If the drive is not able to read leadin/out, that might be a problem if there are audio at the end of the disc. That's my experience with my LG laptop drive with an offset around -500.

Offset: If your drive's offset is 0 (unlikely) the extracted audio will be in the exact place as intended by the CD producer. However, if the drive read offset is -50, then audio will be moved 50 samples compared to the CD. This will obvoiusly lead to inconsistence when different users with different driveoffsets tries to rip. The solution is to detect and correct this offset, and that way ensuring that all users get the same rip - These results are stored in the AccurateRip database, and AccurateRip also makes sure that your drives offset is correctly setup. No need to worry then

Really theres no real "quality" issues with different drives. If the drive is capable of extracting audio (I don't know a single one that doesn't), then it would most likely rip the exact bits correctly. That means you will get the same results from a cheap crap cd-drive as a high-end expensive drive.

I would rather refer to "quality" drive from it's ability to read damaged discs, and then a cheap drive might not be the way to go. Personally I have very bad experience from NEC drives, whereas the Lite-On's I've tried has been very reliable and fast as hell.

I've heard good things about LG drives, but never tried anything but the one in my laptop (which is slooooow).

The only difference I'd like to point out with Lite-On vs. LG is that the Lite-On is unable to rip hidden tracks placed before Track 01 - It's a rare case, but I have a few CD's with those

Thanks for this. The Plextor PX7XX range seems to be highly rated, but the later drives in the range are rebadged models. Where can I find a list of Plextor genuine-vs-rebadged models, if there is such a thing?



Thanks for the link. Very interesting. I think I'll have to spend a while going through this wiki. Seems like an incredibly useful resource.

Phil

Glad to hear that. My machine is no longer cutting edge, but still reasonably fast. I've upgraded the memory and added two new, much larger, much faster hard drives. The specs are:

Athlon XP 2400
1.5GB RAM (soon to be upgraded to 3GB)
2 X 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM hard drives (16MB cache on each)
LG GDR8161B DVD-ROM
LG GCE8400B CD-RW
Onboard NVidia NForce2 sound (soon to be upgraded to M-Audio Audiophile)

Like I said, no longer cutting edge, but way more than capable of handling any sound/music oriented stuff I've been throwing at it up until now. But I'm starting to get itchy feet - might just buy a new cutting edge base unit sometime soon.




As long as they don't mess with the quality of my rips, that's okay. I gather the smaller the offset the better? And what are these other things I keep seeing mentioned - lead-ins and lead-outs? What are they and how would they affect my rips?

Phil

Sorry for nit-picking, but just wanted to make sure that people understand that a '0' samples offset isn't what the CD makers are starting/ending their disc with all the times, since that is highly variable, and that this '0' offset just is based on Andre's reference. Andre established this refernce by looking at 10 CDs and where 6 had the same offset and the other 4 had variable offsets all of them and by big margins additionally.

So, in conclusion, the offset reference we are using is a freqently occuring CD offset, but not the exact CD offset for all CDs however.

I'm eager to find out the offsets of my two drives. How do I do that? And what exactly are lead-in/lead-outs?



See above. Good to hear that AccurateRip takes care of the offsets. I was wondering how that would be done. What about disks which aren't in the database?



I keep reading posts about certain drives (eg: NEC) being crap at audio extraction and others (eg: Plextor) being really good at it. So there must be some variation in ripping quality. That's why I've been asking which drives are "best" for audio extraction.



This partially answers my question above. So, if a disk is clean and undamaged, all drives should be able to handle the audio extraction equally well. But damaged disks separate the quality drives from the bad ones.



Both of my two LG drives in my desktop are pretty fast. I'm just wondering how good they are with audio extraction and all the other little technical problems that are a bit over my head at the moment.



Hidden tracks are a real pain. What the hell is their purpose? I could never figure that out. From what you're saying, I gather that LG drives are okay with hidden tracks? What other drives are also good at this?

Phil

I just verified that my JLMS XJ-HD166S is able to extract the 00 index prior to the first track. AccurateRip lists this drive as a Lite-On.

BTW, this drive is able to accurately rip discs that my Plextor PX-716A cannot. I should also note that while dBpA gives this drive the green flag for FUA support, it does not rip securely when FUA is enabled.

which drive? the 716 or the 166s?

The JLMS.

...we already know the PX-716A has no problem with FUA.

That pretty much sums it up, yes. However, there are then the issue about "HTOA" support and e.g. if you wan't to use C2 pointers during ripping, then you need a drive which supports that accurately also, but in general, then undamaged discs can be read accurately most times with pretty much any drive, but not all supports "HTOA" though. Overreading capabilities are not important however. Personally, then the things i find important about a drive is the following : Good error correction capabilities(for scratched discs), 'HTOA' support and UPC, ISRC and CD-TEXT reading and writing capabilities.
.
I previously used a LG GSA-4167B and it supported "HTOA" which i was happy about, and it also had good C2 pointer support, but it's error correction capabilities where awfull, and many times it would make an exploading kinda sound when loading a disc and then during the entire rip, it would screach like hell and many times show many errors or CRC mismatches in EAC afterwards. I have now changed over to my Plextor PX-755A which is so much better at it's error correction capabilities and also supports "HTOA" and UPC, ISRC and CD-TEXT reading and writing. If i where to buy a new drive today, then i would try to see if i could get my hands on one of the un-rebranded Plextor drives, like the PX-760A, 755A, 716A, 712A, 708A etc. since besides supporting practically everything needed, then EAC additionally supports these drives through it's internal writing routines, which means that all UPC, ISRC and CD-TEXT gets written perfectly to disc, which for me is a very big plus, as i want to keep as much as possible of the CDs that i archive and someday later copy.

What you are saying doesn't make any sense. That would mean that offsets are CD independent. Don't you think you've confused it with "looking at CD's on 10 different drives" instead?

Also, If Andre just used some offset that he liked the best, why wouldn't dBpoweramp use another offset that Spoon liked better?

Yes Odyssey, what he says makes sense, though I don't believe that offsets are CD independent:
http://www.digital-inn.de/exact-audio-copy...ay-offsets.html

No.

Andre's reference is the commonly accepted standard. AR was well established before the accuracy of the reference was questioned. There's a big long discussion about it here on this forum as well. You were around at the time; I'm surprised you didn't read it.

Offset correction is about adjusting a drive to extract from a specific point from a CD. To establish a reference for drive offsets, then you need to decide upon a given CD offset to measure from.

Please read up alittle on this subject to get to know the basics better...

What Martin H was referring to is that there is no "official" offset value. It hasn't been specified in the Red Book standard. So every mastering studio can decide where they put 'their' starting point.

There was an interesting thread about this subject and the supposedly true offset value.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=50301

André just arbitrarily set this reference point, and eventually it became the de-facto standard. Why should Spoon choose another offset? The whole point of having an offset is consistency between different drives.

edit: To the original question:
If you're looking for a DAE drive only, get a old, original Plextor drive. You should be able to get an old Plexwriter cheaply at eBay. There error correction is excellent, also in comparison to the newer 716A. However, I can't really compare them to other drives from different manufactures as I don't own any. I just can say that my PX-W4012A (or 40/12/40A) hasn't failed me yet, and I throw pretty much anything at it, including scratched and copyprotected CDs.

I often wonder about this statement. If you got this notion about skew from cdfreaks, the guy mentioning it said that it was specified in sectors, not samples.

First, thank you very much greynol (i haden't seen your reply, when i previously wrote my previous message...)

Second, i have just spend a long time trying to find an old EAC mailing list message from Andre which i'd remembered reading once and i have now finally found it :

Source : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eac/message/6126

Third, i apologise for being kinda off-topic here...

Edit: Thank you Raiden too

I think that frame boundaries are not fixed. If you shift the whole thing by a few samples you just start to count again and call every 588 samples a frame.
I could be wrong though as I'm no Red Book expert.

I seriously doubt that this is being done intentionally. Anyway, based on the statements by knowledgeable participants in this this discussion, it's pretty clear that they believe there is an absolute reference.

From the thread greynol kindly linked, then Spath said :

Source : http://club.cdfreaks.com/f52/offsets-handl...913/#post727501

Anyway, when looking at the people that have reported that the read sample offsets they get from doing the EAC offset test, is higly off the values it should be + the "it must be another pressing" of AccurateRip + Pio's own tests + Andre's own tests, then it's pretty clear the CDs themselves are highly offseted from eachother and which Pio2001 has written about many times in the past, as in this HA FAQ post : http://www.digital-inn.de/showthread.php?threadid=4193