The ripping code is decent, it's custom empeg-team work. Out of my entire collection, only one particularly badly-scratched CD wouldn't rip, and I had to feed it to EAC on the PC. The CD in question was so badly scratched that it wouldn't play in any standard CD player, so I don't count that as something I should expect to be able to rip easily.

The encoder is the ARM encoder which is based on the Fraunhofer code. When I chose to re-rip everything at 256 on the Jupiter, I did some listening comparisons with the same tracks LAME-encoded with really high quality VBR, and couldn't tell the difference. However, the Central is fixed-bitrate-only, so if VBR is important to you, then it's not an option. Personally, I'm happy with 256 fixed and I'm not near maxing out the Central's or the empeg's hard disks, so it's a nonissue for me.

One of the nice things about the Central is that it's so brain-dead easy to rip stuff, I actually did my whole collection in batches over a few weeks without hardly thinking about it. Just grab another stack off the CD rack and feed them to the Central in multiple-CD-mode while I'm doing something else in the same room. It pops the drawer for the next disk, literally you don't have to touch any front-panel buttons once the process is started, just swap the discs and push on the drawer. When the last disc from that stack is done, pull it out and close the empty drawer, and let it encode for a while. Next day, feed it another stack. Honestly, if it weren't for the Central, I probably never would have started, let alone completed, my re-rip project. The 128's were good enough so that the hassle of doing the rips on the PC outweighed my desire to have higher quality MP3s.