best external drive for ripping CDs

 @mahler123

I don't suppose you kept the BOT-1 power chord?

I've had great luck with my Pioneer BDR-XS06.

I usually burn Best of CD's with one of my Harmon Kardon CDR20's or 30's. Through my stereo system, not my computer. I see that the CDR 30 has both optical and Coax inputs, you might be able to use with an adaptor perhaps?

You can even burn from CD's and/or Albums onto the same cd. You'll need the manual to figure all that out though.

The LG looks good. I have always liked the Pioneer internal and external drives. 

@noske Are you a lawyer? I’m asking, because the piece I quoted is, as I mentioned, from Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) - an organization that represent recording industry in the United States. This very organization has powerful lawyers and will go after you in case of infringement.

I’m not sure what contradictions you found, but basically it says that in case of copying CDs you are allowed to copy any music into Audio CD-R or music you own into plain CD-R. In both cases royalties are paid. Manufacturers of Audio CD-Rs pay small amount per Audio CD-R to RIAA.

Getting back to original question: ripping is different from playing. When you play CD CDP, working in real time, can only go over each sector once. It can correct missing data caused by scratches along the track to about 4mm long, For longer scratches it will interpolate data and that might affect the sound.
When ripping it can go over each sector multiple times until proper checksum is obtained. For badly scratched CDs it can take hours, but it will recover data. The only difference between drives might be the time to do it or the level of disk damage that it can recover. For most CDs any mechanism will do. Program is more important here. Programs such as Itunes don’t make too many attempts and don’t even have settings for amount of tries nor they report final result. Most of specialized programs will report if CD was ripped without error and some will allow to set limits of attempts (otherwise it can go forever). Currently I use XLD on Mac, but before eI used Max where I set limit of attempts to 200. Program instructed CD reader to go over each sector up to 200 times to obtain proper checksum.
Getting better mechanism always help, but it is not as important as CDP for playback in most (99%) cases.