Which computer DVDrom is the best for ripping?

LaCie will probably do you well, although I haven't tried it. They are a bit pricey. For internal DVD burners currently in production, the only ones that are worth a spit are the "industrial" DVD burners from Teac.

There simply are no ROM drives that are usable for extraction. None of them are good enough.

The Plexwriter Premium is a very popular vintage CD burner with enthusiasts. They are considered the standard by which all others are measured. I have a Plexwriter Premium2, but AFAIK the only benefit is with the burning, which doesn't interest me. However, I wanted the absolute best, so I got it. Mankind will never make a drive like that again. They aren't cheap.

The correct way to evaluate a drive's response to low level instructions, and thus its ability to support secure ripping, is with Dbpoweramp and cachex (freeware) from cdfreaks.com.

Optiarc (Sony) and Plextor are no longer worth a spit and were once the premium consumer brands. Now they are just rebadged junk from China. Other than Teac, people seam to have the best luck with Lite-On drives amongst those currently in production. But Lite-On isn't anything special.

I haven't used EAC in a while, but dbPoweramp tests the drive more thoroughly than EAC did a couple of years ago. EAC asks the drive whether it has a read cache. dbPoweramp tries to test its size, which is where most modern disc drives fail. It doesn't do any good to have a read cache if you don't support the instructions to access it.

dbPoweramp also supports FUA, which is not supported strictly by Plextor, despite what dbPoweramp help says.

Plextor drives used to be The King, but several years ago they started being made by some other manufacturer. A current computer magazine I picked up while in the airport last week wrote up the Plextor PX-850SA. They liked it but said it was a better ripper than a writer. This is the drive I use.

I ripped a couple of hundred CDs with EAC about two years ago. All in all, I have found about a dozen audible errors just from casual listening. Re-ripping took care of a few of the errors but not all.

I've since moved to dbPowerAmp as my ripper of choice. After the small learning curve, I like it better. I've read somewhere that it is the new 'Gold Standard' (whatever you can take from that...). I prefer the more modern interface of dbPowerAmp and their suite of converter software it I have to transcode.

I have EAC setup to automatically take charge of iTunes, convert to AIFF and add files to my iTunes library. If I can figure out how to get dbPowerAmp to do that, I may use it because EAC is old and tends to hang in between tracks.

Thanks, Dnewhous and Blackstonejd,

Does it mean that the output file from different CD rippers might be different?

I noticed from EAC, the tracks aren't always 100% (reported quality in the log).