I've been alternating between CDex and EAC. I had similar problems with EAC and Lame, but after I installed Lame 3.91 and played around with the options, it started working well. I think one rips digital audio about as well as the other, especially if your original cd is in good shape. However, CDex is crippled, in that you cannot add your own command line options. This is very important if you want to tweak your compression settings. For example, I use a modified "r3mix" set of options in Lame (see http://www.r3mix.net/):

--r3mix -V2 -b32 --lowpass 18.5

I'm pretty sure that using such command line options to tweak your encoding process is not possible in CDex, which limits your choices according to what it supports in its menu. It's not really important for the average user, but if you're concerned about controlling the quality of your collection, EAC is better.