davidj wrote:

I'm preparing to rip a large jazz cd collection to AAC for an iPod and
I find it very disturbing to use digital audio extraction at 20x! Seems
like that's just asking for a bad rip!

I have 2x1.25ghz powermac with superdrive (rips in the neighborhood of
20x), a SCSI PlexWriter RW 4/2/20 (same general speed on a single
track, but for some reason slows to a crawl when ripping an entire
album, sometimes to the point of failure) and a really old Apple 2x
SCSI CD-ROM that seems to make extractions with more "body" somehow...

I was thinking about buying an old 4x or 6x Plextor CD reader and using
it for DAE with iTunes, just to slow things down and make for more
accurate extractions. Have there been some enormous breakthroughs in CD
drive technology that make these high-speed rips OK, or those old
readers deficient? Should I just use the (convenient) SuperDrive and
forget it? Any thoughts?

I hope you're using EAC -- if you are, at least you'll have some
indication of the quality of the extraction.