Hi,
Here is my 2 cents on "ripping" at rated speeds of the I/O Device, whether CD-R or CD-RW:
I believe that what you are seeing is that when extracting audio digitally from your drive, the programs (MJ and the MP3 encoder) are extracting at very high speed. The difference you are seeing when the WAV format is not selected in MJ is due to the live, one-step encoding of the MP3 files from the extracted audio data. The MJ software is likely handling this encoding process in two steps and hiding the second step from you.
This leaves you with the choice of either ripping at approximately 30x (maybe) or likely higher on the outer tracks on the CD, and then converting these files to MP3 format in a second step using MJ MP3 Plug-in menu's "Convert" feature, or you can set the format back to the MP3 bitrate of your choice and rip directly to the MP3 format at the slower speed with the single step.
You can also go the I/O troubleshooting route and download from Intel their chipset testing S/W to find out if your I/O is okay. But, personally what I have found is that when people buy the new high-speed CD-R and CD-RW drives they automatically think that they will see those kinds of speeds not realizing all the steps that go into "ripping" & "encoding".
I have your same drive and the fastest encoding speed I have ever seen is 18x on a very short file and it was located somehwere in the middle of a CD. I have also seen higher speeds if you just "rip" to WAV and do the conversion later to MP3.
Hope this helps.
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