<<Great post LXi, very helpful. One more question though. Have you heard of or experienced Toshiba's having poor quality DAE? A review on CDRLabs.com said that when running CD DAE 99, the M1612 created substantial errors when ripping audio.
Audio ripping is one of my biggest concerns (quality not speed), so this kind of soured me on Toshiba's (though I really want one).>>
Keep in mind, DAE errors can vary drastically from disc to disc. Im very familiar with CDRLabs' testings, all of the numbers in my posts here were quoted from CDRLabs. Personally I have a Pioneer DVD-106S and a Toshiba SD-M1612 in different machines. And I have not observed any serious DAE flaws in either drive. It is true that some drives may create more errors than others, but unless you're some insane audiophile, it shouldn't matter. As I said, it varies from disc to disc, some of my discs were handled better in the Pioneer than in the Toshiba, and vise versa. Let's also remember that Lite-On's DAE quality also caught CDRLabs' attention, as they try to DAE an extremely ill-maintained CD(scratched and dirty) with the Lite-On, it slowed down to a crawl and created many errors, Toshiba wasn't even able to finish extracting that same disc, and Pioneer did the best overall with this bad CD with virtually no errors. But once they switched to another testing method, called CD-R Diagnostics, things turned around. Lite-On, still being slow, created much less errors; and Pioneer created more errors than they did in the previous test. I said all these to show you that today's DAE quality testings are still not accurate enough, also to remind you that casual users will probably never encounter extremely scratched and dirty CDs. I have no problems with Toshiba's DAE. But if CD audio extraction is the most precious thing to you, then you might as well consider buying a separate CD-ROM solely for the purpose of ripping.