My previous burner was an older Philips PCRW804.

I am having similar issues but I want a different result. I am currently using an older PC to rip that has an LG 8480 cd-rom. As the rip goes to the outer tracks, the rip speed increases, but the sorry slow PC can't keep up with writing it to hard disk so I get skips. Ripping to RAM doesn't seem to help. So I set the rip method to one of the slower ones...end up with 3x on average :P

Some CD-ROMs just won't respond to software-induced speed controls. One thing you might try is the CDSpeed2000 Tools (aka Nero Tools). see http://www.cdspeed2000.com and check out the utility Nero DriveSpeed. You can also find out just how fast and how accurate your CD-ROM can read audio, by using the CDSpeed utility. try them out.

You should set the rip speed to 'default' in the AG setup, if it isn't set already. Also, changing the rip method can speed things up and slow things down so do some trials with those. Buffered Burst Copy usually gives me the fastest rip speed but may not be the most accurate method for your system/cd-rom.
-matt

I could not find the DAE details of your exact drive, but going by the info you posted I'd assume it is the Sony CRX175E drive which get an average DAE of 30x.

Things that can effect rip speed.
Source drive & destination drive on the same IDE controller - either enable "Rip to RAM", or put the HDD & CD on different IDE controller channels.
"Rip Method" -> "Buffered Burst Copy" will give you speed, but on a bad CD drive or disk it does not seem to get a good rip...did you change to one of the synch options previously?
Drive access method, MSCDEX is not going to be fast, try ASPI.

Have a go at thoes Ion and see if it helps.

------------------
-I love my Empeg!-