C2
When they say that "track 2 should be passed BY ANY cd player or it should be considered defective", they talk about audio players. Extraction is a different thing.
From this point of view, audio extraction could be considered as defective from the beginning, if the black strip is wide enough to generate a C2 error. In this case, error concealment could still make the track sound perfect on an audio player.
EAC features error concealment in the beta version (the second C2 checkbox), but it relies on perfect C2 reporting from the drive, and that's not always the case, and it's not perfectly implemented yet, AFAIK.
Besides that, you're right, EAC only reports the presence of C2 pointers, not their accuracy.
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EDIT : the below part is wrong : CRC mismatch with no errors occured doesn't mean that the drive is not C2 accurate, because error corection doesn't rely on C2 info !
To test C2 accuracy, use the DAEquality package from http://www.exactaudiocopy.de , and ensure that the report says 0 skips
To test it, you must use a lightly scratched CD, enough for the error correction to start, not enough for EAC to fail at error correction.
It's the most difficult part : usually, when you're adding scratches to a CD, it jumps from perfectly readable to completely unreadable at once.
Then turn C2 on, and make a "test and copy selected tracks".
You must get some C2 errors, but get "no errors occured" for the test to be valid. Then, if the CRC match, the C2 were accurately reported. If they don't, the C2 were wrong.
I know that the Hitachi GD-7500 is wrong, even though it perfectly report C2 when coming on a big scratch, because CRC mismatch about 1 time out of 10 on perfect CDs with no errors (there are always one or two C2 errors reported for perfect CDs).
It's funny that you ask that just now : I was just extracting a Memorex Black CDR with my Hitachi while browsing the forum. This brand gives me a lot of correcteable errors. As a result, out of 12 tracks, there were 9 with "no errors occured", and only one with CRC matching !
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When I was testing CDP32 (
http://www.compactgear.com/cdp32.htm), the programmer, on r3mix.net, told me that I couldn't get accurate results from the Hitachi GD-7500, because it was known to have a buggy firmware
http://66.96.216.160/cgi-bin/YaBB.pl...num=1007171343
(the "link at CD-RW.org" has mysteriously disappeared, but it was only about the subchannel reading ability, it seems :
http://www.compactgear.com/schdrives.htm).
Gaps
Now, about detecting gaps securely, all I know is that it can be impossible in some cases. Andre explaned why in the mailing list once. I can't access the mailing list archive right now (
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eac) , so I can't search. It's a pretty old post, one year ago, at least, I think.
Overread
You must find a CD with audio noise running before first track and after last track. Ideally an old AAD CD. You must then have a wav editor allowing you to vertically zoom until the quantization noise level (the "pixel" level). EAC could do that (adjusting the vertical zoom to the window displayed), but you can't open two wavs at once, and there can be some problems with fade-outs, the zoom being adjusted too wide on the loud part, masking silent parts.
Avoid SoundForge 4.5, it stops just before the noise level (though it could work if your noise is more than two "pixels" high). CoolEdit is a good one. A demo version will do, you don't need to save.
Wether your drive have positive or negative read offset doesn't matter as long as you find a CD that was "over-recorded" enough.
Lead-in : detect gaps, you must try to overread before the gap of track one. A zero gap for track 1 is perfect.
Extract by range, without offset correction, the very beginning of track one. Open the wav in CoolEdit, zoom to the extreme left, and zoom vertically until the levels 1,2,3... out of 32000 are visible. If there is silence, find another CD.
If there is noise, return in EAC, set the offset correction to -1000, overread enabled, and copy range again.
Look in CoolEdit : the previous extraction is visible 1000 samples from the beginning. If the 1000 extra samples on the left are silent, your drive can't overread, if the noise go on from sample 1000 to the left, then your drive can overread.
Same thing for the lead out, exept that the gaps are not important (there's no gap after last track), the range to be extracted is the end of last track, and the read offset must be set to a positive value (+1000) for the second copy range, in order to overread into the lead-out.
Accurate stream
I don't know exactly what accurate stream means. I think it mean "constant offset", as far as I understand it (same data returned each time).
Feurio is quite accurate at detecting variable offsets, in its drive test. (ten tries over 1 minute, the 500 tries over one sector).
EAC should be accurate too, if you run the detection several times.
I wonder if a configuration change (IDE port, DMA setting) can change the acurateness of the stream. I though someone reported his drive having switched from accurate to non accurate, or cache to no cache or the opposite, reinstalling the computer (changing OS ?). It could have been the firmware being upgraded, though (I know some Plextor switch from no cache to cache upgrading the firmware).