[offtopic]
Couple of corrections:
1) Almost all modern cd/dvd drives sold today are bit accurate. Bit accurate means that it can coherently re-sync between various read audio disc parts (regardless of cache) and produce accurate bit stream. CD audio does not contain synchronisation bits, so the drive has to do this.
2) In addition to this, there is "bad condition" discs reading performance, which can vary from drive to drive (regardless of the drives' bit accuracy!). Bad condition can be for example, scratches, dirt, smudges, problems on the reflective layer (loss of reflectivity), problems on the dye layer (chemical reactions to UV for example), bad burn (Radial run out, bad HF signal, jitter, etc).
3) Various drives ability to read "bad condition" discs varies a lot. There is not single generally known best drive for this. Plextor makes good drives (Plextor Premium), so does LiteOn (LiteOn 52327S for example). Generally CD-ROM, CDR and CD drives are better at audio ripping of "bad discs" than dvd/combo drives, although there are exceptions. A trustworthy place to get an idea of various drives "bad condition" disc reading capabilities is
www.cdrinfo.com hardware reviews. They test with various industry standard test discs. In fact, I think their testing in this regards is unsurpassed by any publicly available data (print/web/any other publication).
4) When the drive fails to read the correct data and actually catches this (they don't always notice when CRC is not correct, this is an inherent problem in audio cd ripping), it then tries to A) re-read and if it fails it will B) fill in the missing samples.
5) There are various ways to fill in the missing samples (on drive level): fill with silence, hold last, linear extrapolation and higher order interpolation. The methods are listed here in the order of increased accuracy (i.e. likelihood of guessing the bits right and/or making the corrections inaudible to humans). Many modern drives these days use higher order binomial interpolation, but not all.
6) When the drive has returned the data a software can check the ECD and compare the correction data from the disc to the actual payload data on the disc, to determine if the read was done correctly. EAC can re-read the data off the disc many times and can be configured not to trust the ECC/C2 flags that the drive returns. There is still debate as to which drives should be trusted in this regard and when the EACs own checking should be used instead. On best of the drives, drive level C2 flagging can produce highest accuracy rips combined with higest rip speeds
7) EAC is not always the best tool to rip "bad condition" discs: it is not always the fastests nor is it always the most accurate in the rips. On plextor drives using Plextools Pro with the "5. Recover best bytes" option can be even more accurate (and faster). Of course, only on selected Plextor drives (like Plextor Premium for example). It is also best used for ripping intentionally "bad condition" discs like Cactus Data Shield 200 protected discs commercial discs (note, these are not within Red Book specifications anymore and cannot be called "compact discs" or CDs anymore).
8) CD-ROM and CD-R Data discs (yellow book and orange book specifications, respectively) contain an additional level of data checking/correction layer that the audio discs (red book) do not contain. This means that while a certain amount of damage to a data disc still keeps the data disc readable, the same amount of damage on an audio compact disc can destroy part of the audio disc completely unreadable. In short, CD-R (data) or CD-ROM (data) <> compact disc (audio). They are different formats with different levels of error correction and synchronisation bits.
[/offtopic]
That concludes our CD audio ripping tutorial for today
