Explain?
If you have EAC properly configured and do secure rips using test & copy, you'll get perfect rips. What's untrue about that?
The point is you will get perfect rips with just about any program that can peform digital audio extraction, yet EAC has a weird cult following that believes it is the only viable solution.
A CD does not have a table of contents like a CD-ROM (data cd). A block of data is 588 samples = 1/75 of a second of audio data and the laser can only be positioned within +/- 1/75 second. In other words, sometimes you get the actual block, sometimes you get the prior block, and sometimes you get the following block.
EAC was written in the nineties to address a particular problem that no longer exists and hasn't for over a decade. That problem is that early cd drives were inaccurate and would often be way off. It maintains a list of offsets for certain drives (most of which by now no longer exist) and applies that offset when it rips. So if it is known (by empirical testing) that a given drive is always off by say 3 blocks, it adjusts the position by 3 blocks. Modern drives are accurate and while they may not be able to address the
exact block at a given hh:mm:ss:ff (frame) position, it will always return the exact same block. If it is really off by 1/75 second, it will be off by the same 1/75 second each and every time. No human being on earth can hear a slice of audio that is 1/75 second in duration, so why even get all worked up about it?
A 'secure' rip is nothing more than reading the same blocks over and over and taking the block that occurs the most number of times as the 'correct' block. IOW, if the drive returns the block just before the desired one 8 times, but returns the one following the target block 9 times, it will take the one that was read 9 times as the 'correct' one. It's a huge waste of time given that you can't hear the difference anyway.
A long time ago I did extensive testing with EAC and my weapon of choice - SoundForge. In every single instance, the rips from EAC and SoundForge were identical. Rip using both, invert one waveform and paste it into the other - the result is all zeros, meaning they are identical.
Now is either rip really, truly identical to the studio master? There is no possible way to tell. You'd need to have a file with the raw bits (pcm samples) to compare with the rip from the CD. Even if you had a so-called studio master CD, you still can't tell because if you use the same drive to rip the master as you do to rip the copy, the result will be identical.
EAC hasn't been updated in well over a decade, it has never been promoted to even a '1.0' version number (it's
still beta), and the problem it supposedly solves no longer exists. Use it if you like the interface and the fact that it is free, but don't be deluded into thinking you're getting bit perfect rips and nothing else can do the same.
