the facts are that no one makes a better drive for DAE than Plextor.
I'm not trying to start a flame war here... just that last time this came up, nobody offered to back up that claim.

I didn't feel the need to do so. That claim has been backed by many test of various computer magazines. The plextors gave the best overall performance for DAE in almost any of those tests. They are always among the fastest drives for DAE, but they are also usually among the best with scratched discs. Also, they are the only drives I would trust for C2 error detection to work as advertised. I had Ricoh, Teac, Yamaha, HP, Sony and Plextor drives, all saying to support C2 error detection, but only the Plextors was near to catching all read errors. While the others effectively missed out an average 10 read errors (I'm counting missread frames/sectors here, not single word errors) on my worst disc, the Plextor averaged to about 1 missed error (slightly below). The Plextor reported about 30 failed reads (or more precisely: sectors read with errors) on an average run of that disc, while the others varied from 18 (Sony, HP, effectively the same drive/writer) to 22 (Ricoh).
So: Even though the Plextors C2 error detection worked best, it wasn't perfect, at least not with that heavily scratched disc, so I still leave EACs secure reading feature turned on. Still, the plextor is quite a bit faster than my other drives.

cu,
sven