zooropa320 wrote:
Cleve Wrote:
The nice thing about the McIntosh - there's not much of a "learning
curve" involved - you just put the CD into it - push a button on the
remote, and the entire CD is automatically encoded into FLAC in
something like 6-7 minutes. And the McIntosh also interfaces with CD
changers - so one can effortlessly copy multiple CDs at a time into
FLAC.
I'm not familiar with the software its using but I doubt its as good as
EAC for making perfect rips. Average consumers want the CDs to rip as
fast as possible. You only rip once but you play it many times so the
speed of the rip is not as important as an error-free rip. If its
ripping in 6-7 minutes I doubt its doing the equivalent of a secure
mode rip in EAC.
I prefer open systems myself to ensure the highest quality possible
even if the learning curve is steeper. It does cause me to wonder
about the market for this unit as the average consumer won't pay the
premium for a McIntosh and audiophile consumers are more savvy about
how to create high quality rips (I assume) and would prefer an open
storage solution rather than being constrained by the included hard
drive capacity. Then there's the backup issue...
Just for reference, the Plextor PlexWriter drive with their proprietary
Plextools software rips at greater 20x, and employs and even wider array
of techniques for ensuring accurate rips than EAC. EAC is slow primarily
because the software is generalized to work across a broad range of
drives, and the speeds it achieves can be quite dependent on the drive
being used (e.g. I get about 5x rips with EAC using my Plextor drive,
but others with LG drives have claimed better than 16x with the same
configuration settings). There is nothing in the ripping process per se
that causes it to be extremely slow, and a proprietary hardware/software
package can rip quite a bit faster. A well designed music server product
should be able to provide extremely fast ripping given their ability to
choose the hardware/software combination.
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