I have a Plextor Ultraplex 40 Max (PX40TSi).
I've always used Plextools to extract audio tracks from my audio CDs.

I've heard EAC was the best tool to do perfect audio rips.

Now, I read on that link
http://www.ping.be/satcp/softwaretools01.htm#PlexTools
that Plextools and EAC are equivalent for audio rips.

Should I stick to Plextools (which is very fast on my Plextor drive) or switch to EAC?

Thank u for ur answer

EAC has much more advanced options then Plextools,and it works with almost all brands of drives....
However,if you wanna rip a good quality audiocd,there's no need to switch to EAC....
You have an excellent reader,and Plextools is a perfect match for it...

I highly recommend the use of EAC, because it offers much more features, like roadworker already said, and besides that, I'm not sure, if the offset-correction of the PlexTools is so "flexible" like EACs one. By example, because PlexWriters cannot overburn into the lead-out, it is better to leave the write-offset uncorrected (write-offsets don't "destroy" data).
But I don't know, how the PlexTools handle this case, or C2 error detection.
Last but not least, I'm pretty sure, that the PlexTools require much more system resources ...

Indeed EAC is the best
EAC with Lame Encoder rocks

Hi,
I already had problems when extracting scratched audio cd with Plextools. But they seem to be working on it.
EAC is really nice but with very scratched cd it can be very slow (0.2x) so I use Plextools at the lowest speed (4x with my ultraplex).

It's slow specifically because the CD is scratched. it's making sure that it gets the best possible copy it can from a CD as damaged as yours and as such will give you the best physical copy possible from your cd.

Plextools on the other hand is just saying: 'yeah, I'm ripping this cd, la di da' and ripping away full speed not worrying about the fact all the scratches are giving you a fairly bad rip.

With CD's that are really scratched that is specifically where you should be using EAC. With CD's that aren't scratched it makes little difference what ripper you use.

When you are happy with the results of the plextools i should stick with them. However as you stated yourself EAC is much better in reading scratched disks (much more read retries) so when you've got a good quality original you can use the plextools and when even the normal audio cd player has problems reading the disk you should use EAC

If you are trying to extract a CactusDataShield protected CD I will recomend using EAC 0.9ß4 and 'Detect TOC manually". This is neccesary for the older CDS100- and CDS200-Versions because the drive will not recognise the TOC correctly.

Unfortunately Plextor hasn't released a single-session-capable Firmware for the PX-40TSi, yet. If they did you could also use PlexTools (>= V1.13a). There is a CheckBox called 'Single Session" in 'Drive Settings' which makes the drive ignoring the scrambled TOC of the 2nd session.

If you're comfortable with PlexTools and it's not giving you any bad rips then there's no real reason to switch IMO. EAC may be the best but it's very feature intensive... excessive almost (for an audio ripper). It'll take a while before you know what every little thing does. And if you're like me, you'd rather know exactly what every one of those 25 features does in X program than know a little bit on what the 100 features in Y program does. I'm not bashing on EAC or anything, just trying to point out that it's not a very user friendly piece of software. I hope they come out with a EAC Lite or something in the future for people like me that just uses it to rip audio to WAV format.

So, that's why there are alternatives. And one of those is CDex.
Not to mention Nero Wave Editor and my very favorite Feurio!

As for EAC, it's good but far from being so-called "the best".