You might want to do some reading on www.hydrogenaudio.org. They are sticklers for keeping discussions factual and requiring people to back up any sound quality claims with facts. You will read how countless people have done experiments as you suggest - ripping a disc with different software or different CD readers and digitally comparing the results to determine accuracty and repeatability.
There you will find plenty of discussion regarding the different popular rippers and their pluses and minuses. I used EAC for a long time. I've since converted to dbPowerAmp with the power pack. I find dbPA works as well as EAC and it saves me time. And like you, my time is valuable to me. Regarding ripping difficult discs - getting a clean copy is certainly a good suggestion. Physically cleaning the disc with mild abrasives and polishing agents (i.e. toothpaste and Brasso) also help quite a bit. It's like cleaning up recordings of vinyl rips - it's better to invest effort in cleaning the physical lp than trying to deal with removing the noise digitally. -- maggior Rich --------- Setup: 2 SB3s, 4 Booms, 1 duet, 1 receiver. SuSE 11.0 Server running SqueezeCenter 7.3.3, MusicIP, and SqueezeSlave. Current library stats: 30,015 songs, 2,448 albums, 451 artists. http://www.last.fm/user/maggior ------------------------------------------------------------------------ maggior's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9080 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=72916 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
