Best CD drive for ripping accurate AND fast?

2024-08-18 18:16:49

Been out of the ripping game for a awhile and jumping back in and re-ripping my whole collection to FLAC. My current drive is one I've had for 10 years, Asus DRW-24B1ST. It does rip accurately but as far speed goes, seems to max out around 13-14x at the end of discs, which means a 75-minute disc takes about 6-7 minutes to rip with EAC assuming no bad sectors. I have a lot of CDs to get through and I would really like to cut that down. Are there any drives known to preserve both accuracy but can also rip faster than that?

Re: Best CD drive for ripping accurate AND fast?

Reply #1 – 2024-08-18 20:21:18

Not answering your question, but if you want to speed up the process I would assume that the biggest impact would be in ripping in burst at first - then re-rip secure only if it doesn't verify AccurateRip. Usually if you got an AR match, you are good.

Yes there are CDs where a more zealous approach can uncover manufacturing defects where burst rips "verify" because burst-ripping drives might often agree on the result. I had one - Pink Floyd: "Pulse" - where I could tell because one track had a much lower AR confidence, still pretty high. Zooming in on the spectrogram on two different pressings ripped, there was a clear indication that mine had a "wrong" frame - I had no chance ABXing it.
(CUETools can also report the number of samples disagreeing.)

Re: Best CD drive for ripping accurate AND fast?

Reply #2 – 2024-08-18 23:32:22

Don't forget that however many x you try to rip at, the drive has to spin the CD that many times faster than normal and they are manufactured for 1x.  I had a disc shatter in the drive when some kind of error caused it to over-RPM, it sounded like an explosion and I was staggered that it had not destroyed the drive at the same time.

I would settle for your 14x and be grateful.

Re: Best CD drive for ripping accurate AND fast?

Reply #3 – 2024-08-19 00:12:31

The Asus DRW-24B1ST has been replaced by the Asus DRW-24F1ST, which has the same top speeds (48x) but supports more disk formats. LG drives are similar, so, I'm not sure there's a faster drive than these out there. I've used both the old and the new and there's no difference in effective speeds as far as I can tell.

Burst is very fast. Rarely do I need to rerip. However, I buy CDs in excellent condition. When ripping the odd damaged CD using C2 error reporting, time isn't the factor, the main thing I'm interested in is how much data can I get, as some of these CDs and CDrs are unique. Occasionally, I even need to resort to an old plextor and plextools in these cases.

Re: Best CD drive for ripping accurate AND fast?

Reply #4 – 2024-08-20 09:03:37

I found that a mix of cueripper and EAC works well. I use cueripper to speed up the process in general and when i run into freak CDs that cueripper doesnt read i switch to EAC.