CD drive improves HD rip quality?

The Pioneer drive in my Toshiba Satellite Laptop seems to do an excellent job.

I think the main thing is that the drive be designed to rescan segments on lower quality or physically marred disks.

The Pioneer normally rips a 3:00 cut to Windows lossless format in just seconds, but can take significantly longer for some disks.

That tells me it is rescanning when needed to make sure that all bits possible are retrieved correctly.

The audible results playing back the ripped cuts off the server are amazingly consistent in terms of sounding essentially flawless in comparison to playing the original CD, regardless of how long it might take to rip a portion of any particular CD originally when problems are detected.

Horseface,

I believe the software used to rip makes a big difference in rip time and efective error handling as well.

At first I used Exact Audio copy and FLAC. IT was complicated, problematic and fairly slow. I quickly dropped it and now use Windows Media Player on the Vista laptop with the built in Pioneer drive and it has been 100% smooth sailing.

The worst problem I have is some CDs not being identified on occasion via the web based service automatically.

Also, it is a very manual and time consuming to burn my vinyl albums to CD first when needed ( I use the Denon recorder on my system for that), but I do not know anyway around that issue.

Can you read non-music CDs OK without problem using your computer cd drive?

If so, your music CDs should be fine as well. All it has to do to rip to disk is extract data correctly. There is no sound production involved at this point (that comes later when streaming to the DAC). So I don't think there is much merit to an "audiophile" CD drive, at least for consumers. Vendors might be able to turn a pretty penny marketing such a thing though!

I think the software used probably makes much more difference. Recent versions of Windows Media Player for example work flawlessly as best I can tell.

I suspect the problem has something to do with how the ripping software is configured to handle errors when they occur.

Different optical drives will have different error rates for sure, some better than others requiring less re-scan. Software has to be configured to rescan as needed when errors occur. Re-scanning will make the rip take more time as parts of the CD are read multiple times to get all the bits correct.

Its possible that the gadget reduces the error rate to a level that the ripping software can handle better as configured.

I think the key is getting the software configured to handle errors correctly. Fewer errors from the drive will help things run smoother and faster as well.

I was lucky I think in that the Toshiba laptop I use seemed to come with a good quality optical drive that matches well out of the can to Windows Media Player to enable consistently good ripping. On some disks though, it can take a significantly longer time to rip than others.

I've ripped a couple hundred disks so far. None have failed. All sound flawless to my ears. I did have one disc ( one of three in a box set) that seemed to run forever while ripping, but it never stopped trying. Eventually, I had to just stop the ripping process on that one and give that one disk a free pass. It does seem to play fine on my Denon player though. Go figure!

Some drives will have lower error rates than others but it is the drive and ripping software together that matters.

Higher error rates off the optical drive will result in re-reads of the same data multiple times and hence longer rip times though assuming software is configured to handle errors off the optical drive properly..

It doesn't matter how you transfer them to server disk storage, only that they get there correctly.

It does matter how they are transferred to the DAC because the source device provides the clock needed to convert the bits to sound accurately.

Some DACs will resample and reclock themselves in which case then the source device providing the bits to the DAC matters less as well.