You did it again. You called LAME a ripper. "file i rip wth the r3mix settin "

Ripping is ripping. Encoding is encoding. It's obvious your tests are using two different rippers and two different encoders. That's more than one variable, which means your test for end quality is invalid when trying to qualify the encoder.

Like I said, do both WMA and MP3 encodes from the SAME wav file. And you want to know why EAC takes so long? Because it's doing a far superior job to Windows Media Player.

Anyway, if any of your rips are taking an hour, you either have a disc that should be replaced or a very poor CDROM drive.

You can easily use emplode to see what the average bitrate is on VBR files. Mine fall into the ranges mentioned on the r3mix site. They are NOT, on average, as large as 192kbit tracks.

Bruno