'Sample Offset' is another new feature of EAC, it will help to always get the same WAVs compared to a different reader and to prevent generation losses. Nearly all drives can not position the head correctly. That means if the program tells the drive to read block 10000 it will probably read data somewhere in block 9998 instead. But this is not visible to the reading program, it won't know if it is really the data it wanted. Usually the head will be set always to a fixed offset before or after the correct read position.

Use Offset Correction for encoding and decoding: (Default: Disabled, Recommended: Disabled) Some compressors do not compress the audio data as is, but they introduce an offset error so that at the beginning is silence and at the end often these number of samples (or more) are missing. This could be bad for compressed live recordings, as they can't be reproduced without gap anymore. By specifying this flag on compression the file will be stuffed and on decompression, by using the offset, the original file could be reconstructed (in most cases).

I do not recommend to use this option. The offset detection uses the default installed codec to determine the offset of the selected compressor, and this codec is not per definition the decoder you use to decode the files! For example, if you use the LAME encoder and have the Fraunhofer codec installed for playing MP3 files, EAC will detect and use the offset between those two. However when you use LAME to decode your files instead of Fraunhofer you are using the wrong offset! And if you distribute your compressed files, how can you know which decoder the recipients will use to decode your files. Some encoders (LAME for example) even already correct their own offset (that is if you use LAME for both encoding and decoding). Thus leave this option disabled unless you know what you are doing and are sure that you have the correct offset correction!