I know you said you don't want to use a PC but I suggest that you reconsider that option. The main reason for this is that you have a lot of CDs to rip and it will take a fair bit of time to do it. I ripped my collection of over 4000 CDs into uncompressed FLAC so the fastest solution was important. It took me over two years to rip the whole shebang.
- dB Poweramp (dBP) can rip your CDs into an uncompressed FLAC file. Hard drive space is cheap and I wanted to insure that I was getting the best quality audio file I could possibly get. Yes, I understand that a compressed FLAC is lossless but higher compression rates tax the CPU more than low compression rates. My OCD won this round. There are a couple other excellent programs that do this but I'm most familiar with dBP.
- I don't think a ripper/player will give you as much flexibility on things like compression rates as a computer and dBP.
- dBP also has several Codecs that can be useful. If you have 2500 CDs you surely have some that are HDCD. This program can read the HDCD coding and rip a 20 bit file - taking advantage of the expanded dynamic range of an HDCD. If you select this option the program does this automatically and reports it to you at the end of the rip.
- It checks every ripped song against its database and reports if the rip is 100% accurate. You can re-rip any inaccurate files.
- It also does a very good job of looking up the meta data for each CD and putting it with the songs in the album folder including the album cover art.
- As I said, hard drives are cheap, and you can buy an extra (or two) so that you can back up your ripped files along the way. I guarantee that you will get very nervous about this after you've spent hundreds of hours on this project.
- Using a computer allows you to have the computer sitting next to your listening chair and being able to rip while you listen instead of getting up and walking over the the ripper for every disc. That will get old in a hurry.
- Ripping speed becomes a serious issue when you have thousands of titles. You will find that the time it takes to rip a CD varies by several multiples depending on what setup you use. I built the fastest setup I could. It is a Plextor PX-891SAF 24X SATA DVD ($27 Amazon). For the enclosure I used an OWC Mercury Pro 5.25" Optical Drive External Enclosure ($59 Amazon) which is a heavy duty aluminum unit. This drive will rip a CD in about 1/4 the time it takes to rip the same CD using my laptop's internal drive. I don't know about a ripper/player but I'm pretty sure that they aren't optimized for ripping speed.
- You need a modern PC with USB 3.0 or higher to get the best performance. When backing up your files the transfer speed is important (it will take several hours to back up the whole thing).
BTW, I use Qobuz but I ripped my collection anyway. I can transfer these files to my DAP or to a memory card to put in my car's media slot. And it makes me happy that someday if the Zombie Apocalypse comes I can recharge my DAP with my solar panel and listen to my collection until they eat my brain. I like to own my music.
BTW, a note on sound quality. I'm using a Jay's CD3 MkIII transport and Berkeley Alpha Reference 2 MQA + Alpha USB DAC in my main system. The PC is an ASUS gaming laptop along with the external Plextor drive. For playback I use Foobar 2000. I've compared several ripped titles with their CD counterparts and I can't hear any difference.
With this setup you sit down for a session with a stack of CDs and rip them as you listen from the comfort of your sweet spot. What could be better?