First, I am always leery of "media center" systems. The quality of your digital music experience is directly related to how good the quality of your ripping and (if used) encoding. Poor ripping = poor sound. EAC is the ne-plus-ultra of ripping, and I wouldn't use anything else.
Second, I certainly don't trust Sony, which is a content provider, with giving me a ripper that duplicates--without addition or subtraction--content on a CD. This is the company that surreptiously installed extremely pernicious rootkits on CD buyer's computers without telling them.