Digital Audio Extraction.... how does it really work?? and more importantly, will I loss any quality in using it?? ( i know it is better than analog but i just want to know if it loss any quality or not. )

And does different CD Roms have different % of quality loss when using DAE??

And would Different sound card effect it as well??

If all is yes, than which CD Rom and Soundcard should i use to ensure the best audio quality??

You need to hang out here


If you use a good ripper (the program that copies the audio to the harddisk) and the cd is not damaged you should have no loss.

The best ripper is EAC.
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

Here's a guide to how you set it up: http://www.ping.be/satcp/


If you set that program up correctly you should get a perfect copy of the cd.


It should if the cd is not damaged.
Some drives might be better at reading damaged cds.


It would have no effect on what's written to the harddisk.



Jan.

DAE is the only way to read the music written on a CD and to copy it to the hard disk. you don't loss any quality in this process, becouse any compression it's made.

different cd rom are different when they read tracks: there are better cd reader (more fast or reliable) and worst ones, but all cd limit themselves to read and copy data to the HD.

the soundcard isn't interested in this process.

the best cd reader are the plextor, but you can find other high-quality devices.

could someone list some ide cd-roms or cd-rws that do their job in quality dae ripping?

Air_Borne - go here for reviews on CD-ROMs and CD-RW drives:

http://www.storagereview.com/

Click on the Leaderboard link on the top of the page and scroll down half way on the next page for recommended drives. Read the reviews on tons of CD-ROMs. All the reviews include DAE tests. Hope this helps.

Daffy

I found this site to be useful:

http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=daeresults.php3

It lists actual DAE extraction speeds for most drives and also ranks them with Quality of extraction being one component.

Contrary to popular myth, the Plextors are not the end all be all of drives. I own the Teac CD-540E (#17 on the list) and I usually get between 9x-11x when using secure mode on EAC. Not too bad for perfect DAE on a PII 300 Mhz dinosaur.

Lots of good utilities and things at the site as well. Good luck.

-E H

The TEAC 540-E is the benchmark for reliability and performance in IDE drives. User reported EAC database shows speed up to 23.1x in secure mode.

The new Asus CD-S520 appears to be its rival, greatly improved from their previous 50x model.

The Plextor PX-40TS is still my overall choice.

What a coincidence. I own TEAC 540E, too:D . Well, it doesnt support C2! I thought that this was quite improtant?

As far as I know, C2 may be inaccurate and shouldn't be relied on. I've yet to have any problems with my Teac, and it rips fast enough even reading the data twice that it's not important to me.

By the way, do you have the new firmware upgrade and the speedtweak tool to unlock the full power of the 540-E? If not, by all means get them now!

Here is a link to the firmware update to 3.0a. The site says it includes the utility to tweak the speed to 17x-40x.

http://www.teac.de/support/downloads/firmware/540e30a.zip

-E H

yes, i have this upgrade, and the speedtool too, but somewhere i've heard that top speed is not recommended.. i use the middle option 8x-20x...

but i have had a teac 16x writer who was ripping faster than teac540e... unfortunately i had to take it back to where i bought it because of writing problems... too bad. That's why i'm asking if there are any other cdrws that rip that fast...

are you sure the c2 correction is correct? i know that on my cdrom drive eac confirms it works, but it really isn't supported. I think that you can check if it is supported by trying Copy & Test in EAC, and than comparing CRC cheksums. If they are same, you can be secure to use c2....
Please correct me if i have been disinformed!!!!

Air

Knowing if your drive has 100% accurate C2 error correction can be tricky. It might work well most of the time, but then again it can fail now and then. So, if you really want to be on the safe side, you should turn off C2 error correction - ripping speed will be slower, but since the audio data is read twice you can be sure that your rip will be 100% error-free (if EAC doesn't repport any error).

so is there really NO way you can know if drive supports c2?

To all Teac 540E owners!

Could you list me which Drive options do you use in EAC (offset, gap detection,...)

Thank you

Air_Borne wrote:


Well you can test your drive on some scratched CDs (where you know where the errors are). But even if everything seems to be OK, you still can't be 100% sure that C2 won't screw up somewhere else. So, if you want to be 100% on the safe side, just don't use C2.

thank you , hvala crosair. How are things in Vojvodina?

SO does that mean it does not matter if i use a laptop Cd Rom drive ( so as long as it support DAE ) it does not matter ( that means it does not have quality loss if i copy it on a laptop with a DAE CD rom ?? )

Correct. With EAC using secure mode, the drive will either produce DAE or lock your system, or sometimes read the disc but give a bunch of sync errors.

How fast it can do DAE is another story.