Ah Dave, I think you missed the compliment in my post, in the LAME settings section....the bit where I say you are the better man then I for having spent time digging through the selection of LAME options to choose what you felt was best for you?

Okay now that we have that cleared away.
The rebuttle
With regards ripping & encoding, it has in the past been my experience that ripping occurs much quicker then encoding - except when using an encoder like Xing. In my case my plextor cdr rips ~26x, my pioneer dvd at ~11x and the toshiba dvd in my work PC at ~6x - all without error. While encoding drags along at around 2x to 4x an my P3-700, my work PC also has a P3 of around the same speed and returns similar results. So yes I am guilty of judging your results compare to my experiences.

When taking into account the limiting factor of the 3x ripping of your Acer cdr it does begin to make a bit more sence, until I look at you time line. At no point do I see the second instance of LAME been used, and you your self said the the limiting factor is the ripping not the encoding.
You seem to have confused "encoding in the background while ripping" with "running multiple instance of LAME in the background while ripping".

Also you seem to have brushed aside the two site I point you in the direction off. This was not in any way an attempt to disprove your setting choices, but rather to put you in touch with others who have gone through these settings or have created these settings and therefore are responsible for the direction that LAME is taking.

Finally do your self a favour and head over to http://www.cdspeed2000.com and check out the DAE speed of various CD drives, and also visit the above mentioned forum. And then fork out the $100 for a new CD drive so the you can remove that limiting Acer burner of yours.

One more question dcosta - how often do you change the oil in your car?