Perhaps a newbie question, but I have two drives - a Plextor Premium and a Lite-on SOHW 812S.

Using EAC in secure mode I have ripped a couple of audio files from some pressed CDs to wav format and then used file compare. The result was the same everytime - there are 10 mismatches between the files.

Essentially, I'm wondering if there is a way to determine which drive is 'more accurate'. 10 mismatches isn't that huge, I suppose; however, I'm ripping all my audio CD's to mp3, partly for back-up and partly so I have the music easily accessible for listening. I want to start with the best wav file possible considering the hardware I have so is there anyway to test what I'm trying to find out?

Thanks for any help.

Hi salviati, welcome to the forum!

If you have used the "Compare WAVs" function of EAC to do the comparison, can you post here the results?

If the mismatches are at the beginning or at the end of the two files, it is probably a problem related to read offsets (if you don't know what offsets are and/or want to know more, visit The Coaster Factory and read "The truth about offsets"). In this case, for your purposes you can ignore them.

If the mismatches are in the middle of the file, then you should be concerned about that... On SATCP you can find very good tutorials about EAC configuration and fine-tuning.

Regards,

ET

Well...I was talking about DOS file compare, but that's because I didn't know about EAC's compare tool. Haven't really used EAC much because I was waiting to get the burners I mentioned.

In any case - I did the comparison via EAC and have attatched it. As well, thanks for the coaster factory link - it looks like there is a lot of useful information there; hopefully I will get some time to read it tonight.

Thanks again.

Hmm... looking at your WAV Compare report, the first line should be related with the different read offsets of the drives, and you can safely ignore it (the read offset for the Premium is +30 samples, and the read offset of the Liteon should be - I am not sure - +12, so this explains the 18=30-12 repeated samples, all zeros probably).

About the second line... maybe the WAV file you used for comparison is only 18 seconds long?

By the way, with your Premium you can also use Plextor's utility Plextools, which also has outstanding ripping features (and read offsets are corrected automatically).

Regards,

ET

In this case it would have reported 18 missing samples instead of different samples, and the range displayed (18.860 - 18.976) is more than 5000 samples long.
Use "test and copy". If the CRC are OK, but the compare wavs do not match, then one of your drives is buggy. If one of the CRC shows a mismatch, this one at least encountered an error during the rip.

@Pio2001,

my question aimed to know if the second line refers to an error in the middle of the track or at the end... I used the "confused" emoticon because of course this information is not enough to explain the huge amount of different samples and I don't really have an idea of what happened in this case.

Regards,

ET