Do i need a CD player, or can I use Mc Book?


Hello Fellows Audiophiles.

I have decided to go digital and follow the path of progress! I think that the music quality has improved sufficiently to make that move . 

So here is my question: do I need a cd player in the chain to use as transport, or can I use my mac book pro?

Or should I burn all my cd to the laptop and start downloading music from HD sources on the web? Will i need a preamp as well, in the chain, or would a direct DAC/amp connection be better ?

All comments, observations are welcome. Thank you.



rockanroller

Showing 2 responses by sfar

I agree completely with freedriver. Inevitably you'll want to upgrade some of the components or software in the future but there are so many  advantages to having your music accessible from a computer that the important thing is to get started. It will change the ways you listen to music, for the better.

There are some things to think about as you put it all together. Music takes a lot of disc space and most laptops don't have very large hard drives. It might not take long to fill up the drive on your MacBook, particularly if you start downloading high-res files.

Consider an external hard drive attached to the MacBook as your primary repository and keep your favorites on the MacBook drive for traveling. Hard drive memory is so cheap these days that you should buy a couple of one-terabyte external drives for starters, one as your primary and one as a mirror backup of the primary for the time when your primary fails, which it eventually will. This is really important, you don't want to have spent all those hours ripping CDs and the money spent on downloads just to have it all disappear when a drive fails. And, again, it's not a question of whether a hard drive will fail, the question is when.

Because the components in a laptop have been miniaturized to save space they are a little more prone to failure than external components and they're expensive to replace. I would suggest you get an external CD/DVD reader to do the ripping. They're cheap and a lot less expensive to replace than the internal drive on a MacBook.
kijanki's solution of having two backup drives is very smart and exactly what I did before I retired. I rotated a weekly backup of my complete primary drive to two drives using SuperDuper so that they would be bootable from my laptop if my iMac failed and I kept one of the backups in my office. 

Since I've retired I don't have a good off-site location but I keep the second backup in a fire and waterproof case locked inside a locked metal gun safe in my garage.

All this may sound like overkill but in the years I was responsible for technology at a large newspaper I did so much grief counseling with people who'd lost months of work because they never made a backup that it made a big impression on me. Once you get into the routine of backups and maintenance of your computer it doesn't take much time or effort and it will help you get a good night's sleep.

To your question about whether to focus on high res downloads, the reality is that most recorded music is not available in high res formats and likely never will be. Focus on the music you love, not on its resolution. Great music at 128 kbps is still great music.