EAC is very good. It would be my second choice over Audiograbber - if I needed to deal with a problem disc. I can assure you that I have a couple of discs that EAC would not be able to deal with. In fact, no program s likely to get far without changing drives. The Plextor is light-years ahead of Yamaha for DAE (I also have a Yamaha burner) but unfortunately there is one Ministry CD that I can ONLY rip with a crap Toshiba drive I have in another machine. If you look at the bottom of the disc, you can see a somewhat differing track spacing, but the disc is not damaged or scratched in any way.

Given a good drive and suitable software, you can get perfect rips without resorting to a "safe" or "secure" rip. However, YMMV and you have no proof of the quality unless you involve some additional manual steps - including the possibility of listening.

I can do 10 rips of one given track in AG and have it come up identical each time. This removes the doubts of a good copy due to random error in the read. AG's interface is too good to pass up for Windows. The next major rev will feature secure ripping.

Any problems that have been introduced into my wavs have been due to me messing with the computer at the same time as the ripping. I am keeping a list of possible problem tracks to re-rip, but so far it's only three items long. And one of them I'm pretty sure has nothing wrong with it (I have to verify with the actual disc when I get the chance). Otherwise I can't really tell the difference between the CD tracks, the ripped WAVs and the encoded LAME VBRs.

Most people are satisfied with far inferior rips and encodes than we are. This can be seen by how many people use XING just because it's super fast. Or how many people use brand-X all-in-one program just because it was free with something else they bought or downloaded. Let alone people who encode at 128Kbit or less (especially without using Joint Stereo at those low rates). Of course most people also don't have gigabytes of portable space to store their music. They're primarily using CDR and small flash-media.

Bruno