Plextor PX-880U

[Clyde Willoughby]

I currently use a Plextor PX-880U for all of my ripping duties. Like anything mechanical/electrical I expect it to fail at some time. Most likely at a bad time given my history. What is available now to replace this great little machine? I'm mostly concerned about accuracy and less about speed. Just looking for suggestions to begin the search. I'm asking here because I have grown to trust the opinions of CA readers. Thanks.

 

[mitchco]

I have been ripping for 6 months with this:

 

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=62879&vpn=BH12LS38&manufacture=LG%20Electronics

 

Have not had any issues at all.

 

Hope that helps

 

mitchco's blog

 

[Brian A]

FWIW, dBpoweramp reports stats on which drives have the least read errors:

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?23074-CD-DVD-Drive-Accuracy-List-2011

 

[Clyde Willoughby]

Thanks Brian. That helped a lot.

 

[sandyk]

Clyde

If you wish to stick with Plextor, they have a relatively expensive external BR writer. A friend of mine now has one , and is getting very impressive sounding rips when using a 12V 4A linear PSU.

I have attached some of the advertising blurb from Plextor.

Alex

 

"The PX-LB950UE is designed to improve user's experience. A special chassis channels the airflow and cools the motor which improves performance and extends the lifetime of the drive. The PX-LB950UE has a low vibration system which eliminates vibrations and a large 8MB buffer which ensures the enhanced writing accuracy at high speed. The PX-LB950UE is also optimized for low noise during disc operations and smooth Blu-ray movie playback."

 

 

 

[Clyde Willoughby]

I'm leaning toward a Plextor. If my 880 blows up tonight it has been a good one. It's done tons of rips and quite a few burns as well without a blip. I will look at the LB950 and am also looking at the PX-W4824TU. Should've bought a spare 880 when they were plentiful.

 

[Panelhead]

Think I paid less than a 100.00 for mine. But hope it last for a long time. The computer I use now does not have an optical drive. Before it was a half ass Superdrive. Plextor is faster, quieter, and much less finicky.

 

George

 

[underscorer]

... as long as you compare the hashes of the rips before and after ripping (and have disabled caching), and end up with matches, any CD ripper is as good as another. I used to own only Plextors, but now I use whatever...

 

I am pretty sure Plextors are now no longer made by the Japanese, but feel free to spend more money on them if it makes you feel better? ;-)

 

If you're on a PC, I'd use dBpoweramp (costs money) or CUE Tools (free) for ripping.

 

[Clyde Willoughby]

I went with a px-w4824tu Plextor. Both of my Plextors are Japanese made. I picked up the 4824 for $30.50 on eBay. Haven't ripped anything yet but I am getting three Donald Fagen albums next week. They should prove it's worth.

 

Since you stopped using Plextors what are you getting good results with now? I'm sure there are other good drives available but I thought I would stick with what I know.

 

[underscorer]

Clyde, I ripped *hundreds* of CDs this past year on the standard issue Dell-provided drive on my workstation at the office. Here at home, I am most often using whatever this Toshiba laptop has installed... and sometimes I fall back to my old BENQ on my server here at home...

 

Any modern drive should work fine... It's more about the software you use than the drive. Either the track rips will match AccurateRip or they won't... It's digital extraction so there is no ambiguity.

 

[Brian A]

I agree that the actual physical drive doesn't seem to matter much regarding the quality of the rip: the software (the good software like dBpoweramp) picks up the read errors and sends the drive back to re-read the frame. The problem with "inaccurate" drives is just that they have to do more re-reading so, technically, they might be a bit slower. Not a biggie.

 

The real problem comes with scratched CDs, but I haven't noticed any relationship to the drive I use. I find that sometimes one CD drive (I have 2 in my ripping computer) reads through different kinds of surface scratches better than the other. On really awful CDs that I don't care that much about (or at least the bad track) I just just go for a software solution and just use iTunes to rip and accept that the track will have flaws (iTunes is very loose about errors even with "error correction" checked). On the other exteme, when DBpoweramp needs to re-rip 1400 frames, I know that it is just going to return an error and just cancel ripping the track.

 

I am currently ripping my CD collection (ripped another hundred or so these last couple of days).

 

[esldude]

I also have found stock Dell drives and inexpensive NEC drives do a fine job. Done hundreds of rips without errors other than 3 or 4 CD's. Oddly these were brand new unplayed CD's. With multiple reads in using CD Paranoia rippers this was fixed easily enough.

 

If on windows EAC is pretty darn good ripping software. A bit slower than some because it is so picky.

 

I once ripped a CD for a friend that was lost in their car for weeks. Looked as if you had taped it to your shoes and walked a week on the beach. Nothing conventional would even begin to play. Took several hours, but EAC recovered all the tracks. Two tracks had skips in them. One track had two brief one second dropouts, and the other one tiny blip of a dropout. Pretty amazing it could do that.