Cd Ripping - is it better to use inbuilt CD drive of laptop or use an external Cd drive

I agree with the EAC suggestion made by several of the others. And at this point I see no reason to conclude that the USB cable had anything to do with the problem, in part of course because a different drive was being used for the two rips. (And see my paragraphs below for some additional possibilities).

Also, while this may not have any impact on sound quality, in my experience full size (5-1/4 inch) desktop CD/DVD drives tend to provide much more reliable performance over the long-term, especially when reading discs that are in marginal condition, than both laptop optical drives and the kind of small low-profile external optical drives that seem to be widely sold these days. If you are planning to rip a large CD collection you might consider purchasing a CD/DVD drive intended for internal use in a desktop computer, having a SATA interface, and putting it into a separately purchased 5-1/4 inch drive enclosure, that would provide a SATA interface internally and a USB interface externally. Online sellers of computer parts, such as Newegg.com here in the USA, sell many such things.

Or, alternatively, you may want to consider doing the rips with a desktop computer, assuming you have one, and subsequently transferring the files to the laptop via a flash drive or a USB hard drive or over your local network.

Also, if you are ripping to and playing back from the laptop’s internal "c" drive, and if that drive is a mechanical drive rather than an SSD, I would make sure that either Windows is set to defragment the drive periodically, or that you do so manually every once in a while. It is conceivable to me that sonic differences could occur between playback of two identical files as a result of differing levels of electrical noise (resulting in differences in jitter at the point of D/A conversion) if one file happens to be highly fragmented (broken up into different physical places on the drive) and the other is not.

Finally, in your comparison of playback of the two files, was the external optical drive either connected or disconnected in both cases? If it was connected in one case and disconnected in the other, I would not rule out the possibility of that being a contributor to the sonic differences you perceived. While that would seem to be unlikely, IMO it is probably no more unlikely than the possibility that the USB cable used for ripping was a contributor.

Good luck. Regards,
-- Al

I use dbpoweramp to rip.

It uses a database to verify your rip as accurate or not by comparing to rips by other prior which is a good way to assure accurate rips.

WIth accurate rip on, the software will reread data and take as long as needed to copy bits accurately. Faster high quality drives will rip faster than others. Damaged or defective disks can take a long time to complete and could still have some errors in the end if really bad (rare)

With accurate rip off, you could get some errors but most are not clearly audible if drive is working properly.

So its really up to the software to assure accurate rips or not. Not sure how exactly one can achieve that based on drive type alone so I think that is a witch hunt.   Better ones will rip faster because they operate faster with fewer errors along the way.

I’ve seen EAC and it is good as well I believe but some may find it harder or less intuitive to use,

Cheers.

To mapman's point about dbpoweramp using a database to compare, EAC also has this feature. The caveat in both cases is that the data is known. Meaning if you are ripping CDs of some bootleg recordings not widely available, or if users opt-out of sending the data, this option will be of no value because the database wouldn't contain someone else's previously ripped information.

Something else (not already mentioned herein) to look for. My assumption is you are ripping directly to a wav file. As you state the Dell CD has less bass energy, check the windows properties on both (Dell and internal PC) wav files. The Audio Bit Rate should be identical and the disk file size should ideally be identical but may differ ever-so-slightly. If theses properties are way off, something is very wrong and in that case you should double-check whatever output ripping options your Jriver, EAC, dbpoweramp (or whatever) is set to. 

Thanks guys for all your suggestions. I use the Jriver MC 22 for ripping. Do i still need the EAC program?

" So its really up to the software to assure accurate rips or not. Not sure how exactly one can achieve that based on drive type alone so I think that is a witch hunt.   Better ones will rip faster because they operate faster with fewer errors along the way."

That's one reason why it would rip faster, but if you're comparing full size internal/external optical drives to the small drives like they use in notebooks and usb powered internals, the full size drives work much faster regardless of errors.

Its also worth noting that ripping is hard on the drive, so I wouldn't use anything expensive. 

" I’ve seen EAC and it is good as well I believe but some may find it harder or less intuitive to use,"

There's several setup guides available online that walk you through the config process. It only needs to be done 1 time. After that, its just as easy to use as dbPoweramp.