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In default configuration EAC uses the burst mode. I recommend to use the appropriate secure mode for your drive. To know what the appropriate read mode is, there is an automatic feature test in the drive options, just below the read mode switches.

No, burst mode has no error detection nor error correction. If burst mode brings up a timing problem, the read command needed a lot of time, which could have several reasons, like loosing sync or trying to fix an read error. Of course this is a really poor “error detection” and should not be taken as serious indication.

Have a look on the CD if it is dirty. Try to clean it (from the inner ring to the outer bound), perhaps it works better then. If not, try to lower speed or even to extract in burst mode, sometimes this will give better results (but no error reporting though).

Standalone CD players perform oversampling and some more error correction. Further, if the error is too big to be corrected, it will perform “error hiding”. That means that the player will hide the error in a way that it is not audible to the common listener. These additional techniques are not implemented in the CD-ROM drives, thus the uncorrected data is given back.

On all CD-ROM media are at least two levels of error correction, called C1 and C2. If both fail, the output is probably not correct anymore. Most drives are not able to report if audio reads failed or not, so each block had to be read twice and be compared to make sure that everything is fine. But some newer drives are able to report if C1/C2 failed on specific samples on a read, making it possible to read only once and see if a read error occured. But there is still a problem, as some drives do not report these errors correctly, so you should test it thoroughly before trusting the results.

If you don’t like to use the secure modes, and the burst mode does not have error correction, the best possibility to check if an error occured is to copy and test the track. For each read and each track, the appropriate CRC column is filled with the actual CRC code. One CRC code is unique for a set of data. So by comparing the CRC values you could be quite sure that both reads resulted in the same file.

This mode is the oldest read mode in EAC, it exists from version 0.1b on. It will read every sector twice, but in very small blocks. This will slow down extraction, no drive features are used. If the drive does caching the option below should be activated, but this could create problems on some drives. This mode is stressing the drive very much and should not be used, if one of the other secure modes works ok. The “disable CD-ROM drive cache” will disable the drive cache when using Paranoid mode, by resetting the drive after a read command. On some drives this will take several seconds and should not be used in that case.

In this case it is always a good idea to delete the EAC entry in the registry. So start regedit.exe and delete the key at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\AWSoftware\EAC

Usually this error occurs when not using the ASPI interface of Adaptec. So try at first to install it on your computer. When you use Windows NT/2000, the native SCSI interface could also make some problems, so also install the Adaptec interface in that case.
Second, it has also happened that an illegal audio codec let EAC crash on enumerating all audio codecs. In that case try to disable (not deinstall) each codec and try again, you could enable the codecs then again piece for piece to find out which one causes the problem. Mainly some versions of LAME and OggVorbis ACM codecs cause this behaviour (included in e.g. Nimo Codec Pack).

Sometimes EAC will autodetect a wrong read command. In this case it is possible that only silence is returned. Try to manually select a read command. In the Drive Options, go to Read Commands page and select the Read Command MMC1 manually (or any other that works). Test it with burst mode. If you tested all of them, but none of them worked, try to extract with another program like WinDAC or CDEx. If both also fails, make sure that your drive is capable of extracting digital audio at all.