Alright, not entirely sure if this was the correct place to post this, I just assumed so.

I've googled and searched and whatnot, I can't find anything that's not years old on the subject, so here we go.

What drive would you guys recommend for ripping CDs? I don't need any DVD or burning functionality, just ripping CDs. Are there any specific features I should be looking for? Is the ability to cache generally a good or bad thing? I'm shootin' for the biggest bang for my buck - like I said, it only needs to rip CDs, but it needs to do so accurately and securely.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

EDIT: Figured I might add this - I have a NEC right now, a few years old, and its error correction sucks. So yeah...

Get a Plextor. Any Plextor (from about 40x up). They have a *very* solid reputation, and are well worth the price. They "only" cost about twice as much as a bog-standard unit.

Hardly anyone makes a "pure" CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive any more. Most units made now are multi-writer capable, and that includes the Plextor ones, yet are as cheap as CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives used to be. Plextor do have a "CD-RW Premium" model, but that is designed for squeezing extra data onto a CD-R with narrower tracks, and is much more expensive - far better to just buy DVD-R discs and a normal drive.

(Disclaimer: I don't actually have a Plextor myself, worse luck. I do have several good drives and some very bad ones.)

If you can't get a Plextor, a Panasonic/Matsushita will probably suffice (these are used in nearly all Macs), but it won't be as good at dealing with imperfect discs as a Plextor. Certainly, all of the slot-loading and tray-loading laptop examples I have perform quite respectably on DAE accuracy.

A TEAC would also be a good choice, as I have found they have good error-correction, but they can lose tracking easily (longitudinal scratches) which makes them unable to read that entire track. They have no trouble with radial or diagonal scratches. However, this verdict is based on a couple of old 32x and 40x CD-ROM units, and may not be accurate for newer ones. I heard a rumour that they share some technology with Plextor.

I don't think Philips make computer drives, but if you find one with their name on, it is probably worth having. They invented the CD format, and still protect the CDDA standard and trademarks.

An LG might also be ok, if you use it with a solid "secure ripping" program, but I recommend using the -z256 flag if you use cdParanoia. One of my units failed to accurately rip a clean disc with the default settings, and I consider that a bad sign. If you can get something better, do so.

I have a Sony DVD-ROM drive which proved to be useless at reading even some clean pressed DVDs, but actually quite good at reading imperfect CDs. Unfortunately, Sony gear tends to be variable in quality these days, so I can't recommend them. Sony as a company also has some ethical liabilities.

Avoid all very old (eg. 2x/4x CD-ROM only) units from any manufacturer though, as they are almost certainly either worn out or useless in the first place. If you must buy an old unit, look for "multi-read" capability, meaning CD-RW compatibility, as that will greatly improve the quality of the optical pickup.

As a data point, I have a 4x Matsushita salvaged from a Mac LC475, which is completely unable to cleanly DAE from a perfectly clean CD-R. I only use that drive to avoid spin-up latency on PC games' "key discs"!

I also have an old CD-RW drive, which is probably a rebadged Sanyo. It is a good writer and still produces clean 80-minute CD-Rs at 8x (I still have 74-minute TDK 8x media from the same period, which work fine). However, it is pretty hopeless at DAE - it will read a perfectly clean disc cleanly, but the slightest whiff of an error throws it out, and it takes *forever* to process a disc in it using EAC.

Unfortunately this is not valid for any of their newer drives, which are simply rebadged drives from other manufacturers. Plextor doesn't make "real Plextors" anymore.
If you are looking for a good DAE drive, get the Plextor Plexwriter Premium or any "old" Plextor (eBay might be your best bet). I've got a PX-W4012A (or 40/12/40A) myself, which is an older version of that line. I've also got the PX-716A, which was their last real drive I think, and it isn't too bad either.

The LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray drive works quite well at DAE, but has some problems with EAC (limited drive speed). It doesn't reach the error correction abilities of my PX-W4012A, though.

Has anyone a newer LG (i.e. GH20NS) or Samsung (i.e. SH-S203B/D)? They are very cheap and I wonder how they perform at DAE...

I've owned 3 true Plextors and love them as much as anyone, but I don't agree that they are a smart buy now, especially at the price premium they command. Heck, does Plextor even make their own drives anymore? I know at least some of them are just rebadged units. Any number of other, cheaper drives will be just as good.

Edit: Raiden was quicker and confirmed what I though - Plextor doesn't make true Plextor drives anymore.

A pity about the Plextors, then. :-( Perhaps I should try to get a PX-710 while I still can.

I have some newer LGs, including at least one of the model number you mention, and they seem to be on the "vaguely competent but not ideal" side. Definitely use an extra-paranoid secure ripper on them, but then you should get good results except from the most severely damaged discs.

I'm bummed about the Plextor's myself... I was looking to replace my PX-716A but I guess I'll be sticking with it for a while... I've been looking for days now and cannot find a single new drive that can overread.

I have a H62N and yes this drive can not rip severely damaged discs; it has a poor error correction system on CDs (on DVDs is awesome). I have a PX-760A and it's a very good drive (overreads, rip HTOA, q-check, rips damaged discs) but this drive like the 716A are hard to find nowdays. For ripping cds, I would get a LiteOn, they are fast, cheap, and rip most of my damaged discs.

actually the PX-760a and the PX-755a are both the last real plextors to be made. I own a 760 my self and have been rather happy with it, both in it's rippng abilities and burning capabilities.

It does cache audio, but with EAC and dbpoweramp you can bypass this using the FUA command, which enables me to rip at a good 14 - 30x. Though my only complaint is that some discs seem to trigger a forced speed restriction and will only rip at 8x with these discs, but I can live with that. If you can find a 760 or 755 and have the money, they're worth it.

Wow, thanks for all the input everyone. O_O And, my bad for not getting it in the right section. That was dumb of me, I saw the CD Hardware section, said to myself "Okay, that's where it belongs," went away for an hour, came back, and totally mind-blanked...

Anyway!



Does this mean having a cache is usually a bad thing?

I'm kinda leaning towards maybe a LiteOn, only because they're on NewEgg and seem to get good reviews. I haven't checked Amazon yet, I'm about to do that and look for some of the ones you guys mentioned, other than Plextors - too expensive.

Thanks so much guys, if anyone else has any input, I'd greatly appreciate it. ^^

With EAC it can significantly slow the extraction process down in secure mode. You can still use burst mode with test and copy and then switch to secure mode for tracks that don't deliver matching checksums, or you can use dBpoweramp which performs burst passes but can also perform re-reads when needed. I'm not as familiar with other ripping programs which may or may not deal with caching drives in a more efficient way than EAC (EDIT: assuming they can also do so effectively!).

Yeah, I use EAC so I won't be getting one with a cache, if I can help it.

Anyone have experience with ripping with LiteOns?

I have a Lite-On LH-201AH that I used to rip my whole collection (50-60 albums) without problems, either using Test + Copy in Burst Mode & AccurateRip, or Secure Mode exclusively when the album was not present in the AccurateRip database. It should be said that Secure mode goes SLOW, so for a caching drive use the other method whenever is possible, which is quite fast. Of course, if the album does not have AccurateRip, you have a problem, although I saw some members (greynol?) saying that even a Burst Test + Copy is able to guarantee perfect rips most times.

Also, good luck trying to find a non-caching drive, these days prolly all are caching. I suggest you look around CD Freaks for information about the presence of such "feature" in a particular drive. Pioneer and Samsung also get good feedback, although quality-wise, more or less all brands perform quite nice for most tasks, such is the effect of a tried and tested technology.

I also have a Lite-On LH20A1H and like you, I 've ripped like 60 (maybe more) CDs without problems. I'm sure that the problem of being so Slow is in EAC. What I've been doing to avoid this problem is using the Nero DiscSpeed or any other software that can spin the drive and then start ripping with EAC, you will get fast speeds in Secure Mode (10x to 16x in most cases). In a quest to find if I have a non-caching drive, the only drive that not caches is the LG H62N. I don't use too much for ripping cds because it's error correction is not so good compared to the Lite-On or Plextor.

Exclusively? If you get matching CRCs in burst mode, what makes you think that using secure mode will do any better?

Yes, there are situations where matching CRCs will occur for a track with errors, but in the case of visible damage this is more likely to occur with secure rips than burst rips. There have been situations reported with defective discs where burst rips have given consistent errors and secure rips may or may not depending on the drive and/or configuration. Assuming you only have only one drive, the best solution for those who are paranoid is to rip both ways. Ripping exclusively in secure mode in the absence of AR verification is not the best idea.

Another vote for Lite-On here. I have the LH-20A1P and have successfully ripped over 150 CDs so far. Taking into account the intelligent adaptive burning technology that guarantees optimum laser intensity for burning on a disc-for-disc basis, it's a total mystery to me why anybody buys anything else.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

Lite-On used to be total crap in the past. Maybe this sentiment has stayed. I was rather surprised that the LH-20-whatever model I installed couple months ago successfully burnt discs.

It's funny how different people's experiences differ, but out of the 50 or so drives I've bought for myself and other people when building up PC systems in the past umpteen years (including drives from Samsung, Sony, NEC-Optiarc, Pioneer, LG, etc), the only ones that have read all discs reliably and produced reliable burns on either CD-R or DVD-R media that stand the test of time and outlive their warranty period by a considerable time have been the Lite-On drives with their adaptive burn technology. Your mileage may vary.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

I see. I'm lucky in that practically all my discs are in excellent state, with almost no scratches, so I guess using one method or the other should yield the same results. I was aware of the recommendation of using Burst copy for damaged CDs instead of Secure ripping, but I only had to use that method twice, once for a second-hand CD (which was almost unrippable, anyway), and another for a copy-protected CD (EAC went crazy with error reporting).

I usually do a quick test to see if a CD is present in the AccurateRip database, and in the case it is not, I switch to Secure mode, which I guess it's because of my old habits with EAC, prior investigating what all those modes were all about. I'll follow your recommendation in the future though

I'm not making such a recommendation.

Just a couple of points...
1) burst T&C is "secure ripping", however
2) burst mode doesn't perform re-reads

It should be pretty clear that secure mode can deliver accurate rips in situations where burst mode can't, but the problem is that secure mode can also tell you a rip is error-free when it really isn't; even when T&C provides matching checksums.

I own several optical drives, both old (CD-ROM only) and new (DVD-RW)... although I must say that I don't rip CDs regularily and didn't do any extensive testing of all drives, but from my experience I can say that if an Audio CD has (a) problematic track(s) that give(s) you errors don't expect any wonders from a "good" ripper.

But what you don't want is a drive that is known to be a "bad" ripper, e.g. gives consistent errors which makes it harder to detect errors. For example I would consider the NEC ND-3500A a bad ripper since it has this consistent error problem. It's a very good burner tho and still my main optical drive...

I had the chance to test many drives with scratched Cds at work. When i got one i had problems i tried several drives.
From my experience the Liteon 16P9S reads some scratched CDs my Plextor W5224A and other drives have no chance.
At work the newer Plextor DVD-RW like the 780A unit seem to be even worse.
One thing to mention is that different drives handle scratches differently. So it can happen that the Liteon can rip 9 of 10 songs from a scratched CD where the Plextor only reads 6 of 10 but the one right the Liteon can´t.
Confusing? So a "very best" drive is not there imho. Some people may have more experience.
Worst one i can second seem to be the NEC drives. My NEC 4550 is only good for DVDs and clean CDs.

A lot of my drives are quite old, but I do have some newer drives which I can report on.

I've been playing with the EAC guy's DAE torture-testing regimen, involving a deliberately damaged audio CD-R. I made the CD-R with my old rebadged Sanyo, which still works fine for this purpose, but was never very good at reading discs afterwards!

The Matsushita (Panasonic) drives built into Macs (including/especially the laptops!) seem to be universally and consistently competent, except for the very early (pre-MultiRead) units. Use a secure-ripper to cope with minor disc problems. Because my newer units are all built into Macs, I wasn't able to determine whether they return C2 information.

I have three different models of LG DVD-multiwriter (GSA-H55N, GSA-H42L, GSA-E20N). These all seem to be okay, for clean and "worn" discs. They also cope fairly well with the torture test. However, the H55N unit I tested under Windows did not support C2 reporting. The H42L, which I assume is the oldest of the three, requires the -z flag (retry until all skips gone) to cdParanoia for reliable ripping. The E20N is an external unit which I haven't tested as thoroughly, but seems to be solidly built all the same.

I also have a Samsung DVD-multiwriter (SH-S182D). This did much *less* well on the torture test than the LG, because it completely lost tracking between two of the scratches, not just on the scratches. However, it ripped the "masked" area without any errors at all, which is encouraging. As long as you take care to avoid longitudinal scratches, this should be a usable drive. The only other black mark against it is that it claims to support C2 reporting, but fails to return any useful data in that field.

I have Sony and Lite-On DVD-ROM drives. Both of these are a few years old, and both of them - unlike any other drives in my collection - operate with caching on audio. However, they do both return usable C2 data.

The Sony (DDU1612) gave an excellent rip on the torture disc, but is known to be particularly useless on DVDs (failing to read some pressed discs that a Matsushita and, I think, a Pioneer had no trouble with). It also produced minor discrepancies when ripping a clean CD in AccurateRip's database, using EAC's secure mode. I recommend this type of drive only for last-resort attacks on damaged CDs, if you can't get hold of a proper Plextor - it seems to have the right optics (for CDs) and good error correction, but poor robustness in the firmware.

The Lite-On (LTD163D) gave a pretty awful performance on the torture disc, actually losing tracking on part of the masked section. I have no idea whether newer units are any better. Avoid.

I'll skip over the old Sanyo CD-RW. It was very clearly optimised for 8x CD recording, at a time when that was a big novelty, and everyone knew to use a "pure" CD-ROM for everything else. Suffice to say that it is awful at handling a damaged disc.

My old TEAC CD-ROMs, however, are definitely worth a mention. They are both excellent mechanically, but they exhibit sufficiently different behaviour to merit separate attention.

The TEAC CD-532S is a 32x SCSI unit. I bought it as an unbranded external unit for my old PowerBook, and went for the cheapest one on sale. In fact, it turned out to be downright excellent. The tracking is thrown off by the longitudinal scratches on the torture CD, causing it to miss the entire tracks, but it reads everything else with minimal errors in "burst mode" and near-perfectly in "secure mode". It is also very good at reading damaged data CDs. Not bad for something I bought a decade ago on the cheap, and have used continuously since. However, it doesn't report C2 data, and is simply too old to use the MMC command set.

The TEAC CD-540E is a 40x ATAPI unit. I bought it on the strength of my experience with the CD-532S, when I needed an ATAPI unit for building a new PC - at the time, ATAPI drives were usually considered vastly inferior to SCSI. I haven't been disappointed, since it will work it's way through data CDs that are on the verge of collapse, and at a decent speed. This one *does* support the MMC command set, and even reports C2 data reliably, but I think it's DAE capabilities are slightly behind the SCSI version - in "burst mode", it skipped several times on the masked wedge, but it did avoid losing tracking entirely on that section. I suspect I'm seeing a limitation of the early ATAPI firmware, not the drive itself, so a secure ripper should be able to compensate.

I should point out that *none* of my drives were able to recover audio data from behind the longitudinal scratches on the torture disc. However, some of them did a reasonable job of recovering audio from the remainder of the tracks at that radius. Most of them also recovered all, or nearly all, of the data from the masked wedge, but there were notable exceptions.

The bottom line: Get a *genuine* Plextor if you can. If not, get a TEAC (assuming they've kept up their quality standards), or an LG, or borrow a Mac for it's Matsushita. In all cases, use a reputable secure-ripping program and keep your discs clean!

On a sidenote: I think scratched tracks are somewhat different to other failing tracks. My CDs are usually unscratched, yet I have some that I can't manage to rip without errors. If the CD is "rotting" from the inside, then it's a much harder challenge for the drive to get a good result, if not impossible since the actual layer that is storing the pits is damaged.

Definitely. I would draw a distinction between several categories of damaged disc:

- Poorly pressed / mastered in the first place, including low "contrast".

- General dirt and scuffing (with light scratches in many random directions).

- Longitudinal scratches (along track direction). These will usually require careful treatment before the disc can be read by any drive.

- Degrading data layer. This is caused either by damage to the *top* surface of the disc, or to decay of a poor-quality CD-R.

Additionally, I think there are four parameters that define the quality of a drive:

- Optical pickup - some focus better, some have a better discriminator, some don't.

- Optical tracking - some follow a track very tightly, which is usually good, but makes them more susceptible to longitudinal scratches; some correct for this kind of mistake and are able to pick up the track after the scratch; some simply don't track well.

- Error correction - some drives seem to use only one layer of the Reed-Solomon error correction code, when there are two available on the disc. These will perform very poorly on even slightly imperfect discs. Some are possibly able to combine the two layers mutually, turning it into an extra-powerful "turbo code", and these will perform extra well.

- Command set and firmware - an otherwise good drive can be rendered essentially unusable by buggy or badly-designed firmware. A few drives (eg. true Plextors) allow extended control, which can give them an edge when guided by sophisticated software.

But also pressed Audio CDs suffer from the latter case. The lacquer or more specific the use of inappropriate solvents in it has turned out to cause enough damage to the polycarbonate of some commercial Audio CDs for them to become faulty.

The Samsung SH-203B is one of the best audio rippers I have ever used. I still prefer my plextors for a number of features no other drives offer, but really, the 203 is amazing. It has ripped (confirmed by AccurateRip) a small pile of discs that none of my other drives could do with multiple long runs and it did them straight through without breaking a sweat... For most people, this is THE drive I would recommend right now!

I had a nice surprise at a video game store. I had a CD with a bad scuff from the drive being hit during play and the lens hitting the disc. The disc resurfacing machine completely polished it out making it like new - for only $3.

G²

@Eli: Is the SH-S203B the same thing, or...? The S203B is the only one NewEgg has and it's SATA, so I was just curious if that's the one you use. Much thanks.

Samsung SH-S203B
http://www.cdfreaks.com/reviews/Samsung-SH...D-Burner-Review

C.

Yeah, that's what I meant. *edits*

Can somebody explain me what 'overread' is good for and how can I test my drives to detect if it supports 'overread'?


thanks for any answer,...

Yes, sorry, I gues its the Samsung SH-S203B

No new samsung or LG drives over-read. I have tested many. Plextor are pretty much the only drives that over-read.

What's so precious about over-read? Offset is insignificant part of a second and is usually complete digital silence.

Is it just the offset? My LG GGC-H20L zeroed about 8000 samples at the end of a CD...
Maybe this was just an individual case, I'll do some more testing.

YES! I don't see the reason for being SO paranoid about milliseconds of silence! Here is the EAC tooltip, typed word-for-word by hand:

"When using the read offset, there will be some data missing either at the beginning or at the end of a CD, depending on whether is offset is positive or negative. Some drives allow reading before the actual CD starts or after the CD has ended. So no samples will be missing in the extraction using this compensation."

So do yourself a favor, stop looking for the "Overread into lead-in/lead-out" feature, right now.

Some of us chose to...Do a search in the forum. Everyone has a different opinion...

Some samples might be missing! You never know. Hence why all my drives are Plextor and can read into the leadin/out!@

Ok, what to search for? I tell you the information, and you then make an informed choice, no need to look back what others recommend based on myths, tales or legends.

Good that I triggered some discussion about that 'overread', because the first answer did not answer my question what 'overread' is good for. Now I have an idea about that.
If I understand it right, then an overread-able drive can read the very beginning and ending of a CD but have nothing to do with the gap between the tracks. Right? And normally there is absolutely no need to care about overread, just to ignore?
I discovered, now when I test my drives with EAC (to find the best drive for dae), that the ripped tracks are ending abruptly (missing about 3-5 seconds). I did not troubleshooting that yet, because I'm very busy to find my best drive, so I did ignore that so far. But again, the abruptly ending tracks have nothing to do with overread? I guess some setting in EAC could be wrong...?

>But again, the abruptly ending tracks have nothing to do with overread?

A drives biggest offest would be .0x of a second maximum, most are just 6 or 48 samples! (.00x)

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=535072

Thanks for the link!
Also ~8000 was slightly incorrect. With the overread box checked there are 14749 zero samples (so about 25 frames) at the end. Unchecked 637 samples (the offset) are missing as expected.

For the last few years I haven't kept up with new DAE drives because I'm perfectly happy with my Plextors, but I'm shocked that so few drives nowadays can do what I want... My Plextors won't survive forever! Of course there is eBay, but I shouldn't be forced to buy used drives for such an 'easy' task.

The Samsung SH-203B doesn't look bad from feedback here. It can't overread though... One could solve at least the lead out problem by using the 'new' offset (+6 - 30 = -24), but what about the lead in then? *head explodes*

I know that would be easier, but were would be the fun? It's technically possible, so I'm not gonna settle for something less 'perfect'. It's all like "the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it, but you can't."

So what do you do about discs with non-silent samples after the area overread in the lead-out? What if there are non-silent samples in the lead-in at the same time?

Honestly, if I could only have the option to overread from the lead-in or lead-out and not both (yes, I know true Plextor drives can do both) I'd much rather have a drive that can overread from the lead-in. The reason being is that there are discs that haven't been manufactured properly which have several thousand samples of true audible data shifted so that it starts in the lead-in. I'd much rather be able to grab this than the tail of a fade-out that has probably already dipped below the noise floor.

Of the features that not all drives have, I would put the ability to extract HTOA above overreading. Also, for those interested in overreading, I don't see any concern about overwriting. Those last 30 non-silent samples you guys covet cannot be burned by those very same drives that you cherish.

@spoon; with other words: 'overread'=ignore
thanx


@all
Right now I’m testing 26 drives to sorting out the bad drives, which are useless for dae.
Hereunto I do have questions;

Should I care about C2 on non-Plextor drives?
-> I have some that should support C2, some of them do not and some other EAC (Examine C2 Feature) and dBpA are at variance about that. It feels not save at all!

Can I trust EAC, when it says that a tested drive do not caching? And would that also be valid, if I use that drive with dBpA?


Thanx,..

Concerning EAC, so long as they don't also cache audio data sure; otherwise I would just use burst mode. Concerning dBpa I would use them and although they are much more reliable than with an unverified pass using EAC, care still needs to be taken to make sure they're working properly.

EAC and dBpa don't seem to use the same read commands, since I have a drive from which EAC can receive C2 pointers but not dBpa and another drive where the situation is just the opposite. As for what is safe concerning the use of C2 pointers, I recommend a test pass in EAC for tracks that AccurateRip cannot verify. With dBpa make sure you configure it to perform one ultra secure pass.

Yes, though testing for caching involves timing. If your computer is doing other things while detecting whether a drive caches audio data, the results may not be correct. The best thing to do is perform a few runs to make sure the results are consistent.

No, you will need to run the detection with that program as well because EAC performs re-reads differently than dBpa. With EAC, drives that cache less than 64kB do not need flushing. This is not the same as with dBpa. Another caveat, dBpa has shown trouble detecting the cache of a Plextor PX-230 as well as whether the FUA command works with some non-Plextor drives (I mention this because the test involves cache detection). If EAC says a drive caches and dBpa says it doesn't then I'd be inclined to believe the drive caches. In order to determine how much, try this program...

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f52/cache-explorer-184487/

It can be helpful if EAC isn't giving you consistent results as well.

If the following is undertaken then 100% verified c2 detection is assured:

Take a CD, one you do not like and in the middle of the disc (middle from inside hole to outside edge) draw a square with a black marker that is 1cmx1cm. Then use a program (EAC or dBpoweramp) to detect for c2 you should see the detection get to around half way before stopping and reporting that c2 is supported. This is needed as some drives which do not support c2, return c2 errors right from the off when they should not.

As far as caching in dBpoweramp, I always recommend that the safe option of leaving as 1024KB unless you are 100% sure the drive does not cache, such a setting in dBpoweramp will not slow down too much because of dBpoweramps design.

There's still this little nagging issue...
http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showpost.php?p...mp;postcount=14

EDIT: I should be a bit more specific. Do you think your test would have shown that this drive does not provide C2 pointers? Clearly errors did indeed get though the the C2 net which was supposed to catch them. The re-reads is shown in the last log are 3/4 of the way through the track. If the error occurred where there were no re-reads, it still indicates that errors were not flagged with C2 pointers. The track was branded as secure, but the CRC was clearly not the same as earlier attempts that were verified with AR.

greynol -

Are the drives that dbpa fails to retrieve C2 with connected via IDE...or are they connected via external methods (firewire? USB?).

Using bustrace I found that EAC and dbpa use* the same MMC read commands in most cases. The read and buffering strategies can differ, however, and it is these types of difference that may explain both the trouble dbpa has doing C2 over firewire** as well as why EAC had a problem with end-of-last-track-on-with-overread-enabled.

* or "can use"...I haven't looked closely at EAC's default behavior, but dbpa seems to vary the read commands between two different MMC CDBs under some circumstances, one that uses the block # and the other that uses the MMSSFF pointers.

** which spoon says he's addressing in the in the current 13.1 beta cycle.

-------
On to the next post which the forum software nicely combined with my last post...
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Perhaps the cache value was set too low for this drive, and the frame rereads (notably clustered) were being mistakenly being re-read from cache?

-brendan

The one that provides C2 pointers with EAC but not with dBpa is an old Sony 52x IDE CDROM drive. I mentioned the problem sometime ago and on more than one occasion.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=442260

The C2 pointer should have failed any bad sector even if it only came from the cache if it were doing its job properly, correct?

I specifically remember a this conversation with funkyblue. He was under the impression that FUA was working with his drive because dBpa was marking a track as insecure. He thought this meant that re-reads couldn't have been coming from just the cache and not the disc. However, he was also using C2 pointers. What was happening was that each pointer was continually directing the program to reject its frame.

I wonder why this Samsung 203B should be good at ripping audio if the 203D does that bad.
http://cdrinfo.com/Sections/Reviews/Specif...50&PageId=2
If you compare results to other drives tested there its error correction seems pretty lousy.