I got two burners installed, one LG and the other Liteon. The LG is having tons of problems ripping through EAC. In burst mode it won't produce the correct CRCs, and in secure mode often it halts on sync errors.

When I scanned the CD with the Liteon, the scanning speed is fluctating wildly, the scan results were good but the speed looks like a electrocardiogram reading a patient having a seizure.

Are the CDS damaged (all of them) or are both drives bad?

Make sure the drives are operating in DMA mode.

Also, if they're both on the same IDE channel, I've heard that could be a problem.

They are already in DMA mode, and the LG is on SATA.

I have heard of this happening on some CD's with DRM.

Which? Is it the ripping problem or the wild fluctuation in reading speeds?

The CDS are new releases so they could be implemented with the latest copyright technology. This is crap.

I have had a few protected CD's that would not rip at all in dBpoweramp. I was able to rip them in EAC though.

R13 (alpha) has a 'defective by design' ripping mode which may help.

Both happen with CDs with DRM. My laptop drive would look like the electrocardiagram and the NEC on the desktop wouldn't get the right CRCs... actually the song would sound like it went through a blender...

Find an old disc that wouldn't have DRM.

Sometimes CDs with those movies and autorun would screw up EAC and there would be a data track in the middle of the album image. Using TweakUI from Windows and disabling autorun on all devices fixed that problem.