Love to hear your opinions on this, tell me which you think is best, i will probably end up trying them all..

If you're actually "ripping" (DAE - Digital Audio Extraction) from CD, then there should be zero hiss or other noise if your rip is being done properly on good equipment.

If you're talking about sampling or digitizing (taking an analog source, like tape or external CD player, and connecting it to your sound card), then there are many factors that can introduce/eleminate noise.

For DAE your best bet is to start from the most basic component, the CDROM drive. There are many opinions, but the facts are that no one makes a better drive for DAE than Plextor. No other manufacturer can claim DAE speeds as high and jitter correction or the same level of compatibility with the largest number of CDs.

Next, if you are going to be extremely anal about getting absolutely the perfect rip on the very first try, then you'll want to use a piece of software that allows "secure" ripping. Your primary choice for windows is EAC (Exact Audio Copy). For Linux, CD-Paranoia as far as I can remember. EAC will rip the same sectors over and over to ensure a perfect copy (read the EAC site for fairly detailed information).

AudioGrabber doesn't have a secure mode, but it's a very capable ripper with a great interface.

I'll let someone else cover analog-to-digital recording (digitizing) - AudioGrabber supports this too (and can use some noise filtering plugins).

The encoder you choose will have no effect on the quality of your rip. But it's possible (and easy) to turn a perfect rip into a crappy-sounding MP3 file. That's a whole other thread though.

Bruno

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. Are you saying best accuracy, best at reading damaged discs, best at reading copyprotected CDs, best speed, best price or best in some other category?

For speed, the Plextor certainly is not the best.

Best jitter correction. Fastest speed. You claim your Kenwood goes up to 32x and you've once seen 35x? My Plextor always goes beyond that. It finishes a full disc at its top speed, 40x (a little faster on longer discs).

99.9% of all CDROM drives out there do not do DAE at any speed comparable to their data-read speeds.

Price is one thing that you will not find Plextor beating out other brands in. I said best for the purposes of DAE. That doesn't include price.

Running EAC you should be able to compare how long it takes with one drive versus another. I'm pretty sure I've seen someone run through this type of test for a selection of drives. There aren't too many drives where you can get a perfect and consistent rip without using something like EAC at the drive's full speed.

Plextor's track record for DAE is unprecedented. I'm busy doing searches on other things right now, but I'm sure you can turn up plenty of info yourself using only google.

Bruno

Best accuracy, best at reading scratched discs. Thats my opinion.

sean

The only reason I have heard Plextor drives are good for ripping is because they are designed to be able to do block-accurate addressing on Audio CDs. This ensures a perfect rip without needing to do jitter correction in software. A complete discussion of this topic can be found here.

It is possible that, since the above-linked text was written, other drive makers have also added this feature to their drives. If that is the case, then the Plextor advantage is no longer as great as it used to be.

This chart shows DAE speeds as measured by the CDSpeed program. I don't know how accurate of a comparison that is. Seeing the 43.8X DAE in the row for the 62X (my drive) made me wonder what I was doing wrong. I hadn't used EAC before so I grabbed a copy and tried it.

Attached is the result of running EAC in burst mode. It averaged 42.4X for the whole CD. I then tried it in sync mode and averaged 35.4X for the same disc. In secure mode, it got 7.4X and probably would have been just over 9X if it weren't for the errors on tracks 17 & 18. Now I'm curious to see how much faster the 72X drive would be.

To check accuracy, I pushed the .wav's for the 1st track using each of the three methods over to my linux box. I ran cmp against the secure and sync ones and they are identical (as expected). Much to my surprised, the burst mode .wav is also exactly the same as the other two (I'm sure it wouldn't match for the tracks with errors, but I didn't try).

For overall rating, the Plextors tend to come out far ahead of the Kenwoods in user reviews. Many people complain they have trouble with some CD-R(W)s in their Kenwoods and I know Safe-Disc'd games don't work. But for ripping audio, I'm pretty happy with it.

The only reason I have heard Plextor drives are good for ripping is because they are designed to be able to do block-accurate addressing on Audio CDs. [snip]

It is possible that, since the above-linked text was written, other drive makers have also added this feature to their drives.

Yes, they have (we got to find out this sort of stuff when designing the Rio Central).

If that is the case, then the Plextor advantage is no longer as great as it used to be.

There's still an advantage IMO. I've got one CD, that doesn't even appear scratched, that I couldn't rip in any PC at Empeg Towers except the one with a Plextor (PX-40TS).

Peter

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

For what it's worth, my company bought 4 of the 72x Kenwoods for an internal project, and less than 18 months later, they all had alignment problems so bad we had to replace them. Kenwood barely acknowledged their existence.

It may be just an isolated incident, but we've been buying Plextor's for heavy-duty applications ever since.

alright, so low noise encoding, what rate, what encoder?

LAME 3.91 Constant 320kbit with a tweaked high-pass setting.

LAME 3.91 VBR -alt-preset (read about them and pick one)

LAME 3.91 VBR -r3mix (read about it, leave out the normalizing parameter)

Bruno

OK, so lets say I want to upgrade to Plextor drives... IDE or SCSI?

The only thing against SCSI is cost in my opinion. I have always run SCSI hard drives, so I obviously chose a SCSI Plextor (I didn't need to go out and buy a new controller).

If you already have a good SCSI controller, then you might as well get the SCSI UltraPlex40max. If you don't, I'm sure you're pretty safe with one of their IDE models (perhaps even a writer if that would interest you). Put it on a different channel than your IDE hard drive.

Bruno

Get the SCSI version. And if you don't already have a SCSI controller buy an adaptec 2904CD. It's only about 40$, but it does a perfect job in steering cd-rom's and writers.
I gave up on SCSI harddisks two years ago because of the cost (nowadays I prefer storage to raw speed), but SCSI cd devices are not that much more expensive than their IDE counterparts and do a better job IMHO.

alright, what i want to know now is which setting to use vbr to get a great sound without clipping the high or low end.. these things seem to change so freakin frequently..

also where can i read about the diff command line options?

My tracks are all using the arguments from r3mix minus normalizing and with a 19.5 filter freq. Sounds very nice.

Someone posted a link to some of the alt preset information. It's by a guy called "dibrom" so search the BBS for links to his site. Full lame installations come with a few reference files as well - don't know how detailed they are on any of the preset info.

You can read about all the r3mix stuff at www.r3mix.net. Worth the read even if you're not going to use that preset.

Bruno