How Do I Rip a CD with Best results on a MacPro

Audioengr, what are examples of an outboard USB CDROM drive with C2 error correction? I own a Macbook Pro too.

Is there an inexpensive way to achieve a better quality CD copy than the original?

Rather than use the internal CD/DVD drive that comes in the MacBook, I purchased an external LaCie peripheral drive to rip and burn music. I use Max ripper software for Mac and rip as an uncompressed AIFF file. I also use the strongest error correction setting in the software to minimize the possibility for errors in the read. In my experience, lossless files (including ALAC files) have a noticeable degradation in sound quality when burned to a disk so I don't use compression for music I want to listen to critically. Hope this helps.

Foster - I use a Teac drive, but Plextor makes them too.

To get better than original results re-writing a CD to CDROM, here are the things to do:

1) use good media - Mitsui gold audio master
2) clean and treat the media prior to burn with a good treatment
3) write the disk at slow speed or use writers like the Yamaha that are optimized for this
4) get the writer modded to have a lower jitter clock in it

I don't do any of this anymore because CD players and transports are inferior to good computer playback.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio