I've noticed that the drive itself makes a lot of difference. I have a Samsung DVD and an old Philips CD-RW (2x!). The Samsung is very critical of scratched/soiled CDs whereas the Philips is not too dissimilar to a normal CD player in tolerance. If you have different drives in your PC, experiment a bit.

There's also a lot of differences with ripping programs. One ripper that's very good is ExactAudioCopy, but can be slow with more critical Cds.

Added advantage is that EAC can start MP3 encoding and add ID3v1 tag at the same time whilst ripping (well, after it's finished the first track) by a command line. I use LAME 3.91 VBR with very good results.

Go to: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de