Recovery of damaged audio CD's

I have a lot of damaged audio CD's, which i am looking to get back to a working state again. Hence, i am interested in the drive which is best at recovering these CD's. I have seen a lot of reviews of drives, but no standard way of measuring how good their error recovery on damaged CDs are. True, no two damaged CD's are the same, but i would have thought someone would have made a specially pre-scratched reference CD and tested it in some of the newest drives at some point. I am looking at the plextor and liteon models, but i have some questions

1. Which model is best for the extraction of physically damaged pressed CD's, and why?
2. Does the new 52x liteon correctly support C2 error data? i heard it flags C2 errors, but is unable to send the correction data, when the older 48x model does. I guess this would be quite important for at least partial recovery of some quite badly damaged CD's using older versions of EAC which give you the option to use C2 data for recovery (it was later removed, since a lot of drives flagged but couldn't send, resulting in corruption)
3. Do the plextor tools give good recovery of damaged CD's in comparison to EAC and other high end audio rippers? and do the plextor tools use C2 error recovery?


Im not too worried about recording quality, i can experiment with media and speeds here, and from lite on / plextor it should be very good anyway.

I just found this: http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/79/6 looks like the Lite-On LTR-32123S is the best, anyone have any comments?

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Last edited by darkangel; 19-10-2003 at 18:49.