Best audiophile ripping software for Mac?

The only thing that makes EAC special is that (according to its author) it does better error correction than other Windows ripping software. Since I have a dual booting PC (WinXP and Redhat) as well as a Mac, I'm familiar with the output of most of the popular programs. I generally rip using iTunes on the Mac.

Unfortunately, there isn't really anything out there on the Mac that is equivilant to EAC. The closest thing that I am aware of is an old command-line utility called cdda2wav that uses something called Paranoia for error correction. There are a few different GUI front-ends for this utility, one of the more popular being xACT: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/21952

However, cdda2wav and Paranoia are useless for error correction if the CD drive operates with any cache. Because virtually every modern CD drive (and all of the optical drives that Apple uses, AFAIK) does indeed cache, there is really little point in using xACT for ripping. iTunes' error correction is pretty much the best we have at the moment.

As far as I know xACT is the only app for Mac that is even close to what EAC does.

What about Max?

http://sbooth.org/Max/

I hadn't heard about it until tonight. Looks alright and has more output options than xAct.

That app looks promising. It is always good to have more choices of quality software.

Again, because it uses cdparanoia, Max is actually useless in terms of error correction, because cdparanoia cannot correct errors on drive that cache, and AFAIK all Macs use drives with at least some cache.