What I don't understand is how some tracks can get 99% or lower quality when leaving the drive speed to Actual, versus changing to to say 48X and then getting a quality of 100%. I noticed some behaviour with my drive speed set at Actual when ripping a very scratched and scuffed used CD as EAC would stop at points in a track for several minutes without any what I would call activity, and then slowly begin again only to repeat the process. The extraction was at 40 minutes and wasn't even half done yet. When I decided to give up out of fear of damaging the drive and then configured EAC to use the drive maximum speed at 48X which for some reason isn't always selectable it did the secure mode error correction as if it were just a minor problem spot and finished the disc in about 10 minutes. Are you really sure that this extraction was exact? Was the CRC OK? Did you extract several times in the same way and the files were identical ? Did you verify (compare) your extraction with an other extraction from an other drive or with the recording from the digital out of an external CD-player ? Did you use accuraterip and the tracks were accurately ripped ? Even if the CRC was OK, the extraction still can be wrong. I once had this case (only one times). To make me believe what you said, you have to do all of the above. Because from all of my experience with EAC, such a behavior means that EAC doesn't work correctly with the speed set to 48x. But I've no experience with that, there's always only "actual".