why wait, when you can get a sweet-ass Ricoh MP9120 DVDROM/CDRW drive right now?
oh look, it has burning speed of the fastest plextor, and quite possibly better Burnproof technology (they claim better, but we have no way of prooving it.. at least it works!) too.
with a firmware update I'd have to say that this drive would do very nicely in terms of Audio extraction.. it certainly has the potential, but something limits it to 8x artificially..