Ripping CD's to hard drive

@cjlundberg 

Anything at or above 192kbps MP3 is fine.

Below 192kbps it's fairly easy to hear sonic degradation on anything other than speech only/ simple recordings.

FLAC now seems to gradually be taking over from MP3 as the preferred file medium of storage but I can't say I hear any improvements with it.

I'll only use FLAC to rip the rarest or most important of recordings.

Giving each disc a quick cleaning wipe before ripping won't hurt either. I usually breathe on the disc first and then wipe it off using a clean cotton T shirt.

Some say that you should use 8x or 10x ripping speed and switch off error correction, but I can't say I've noticed any difference here either.

Therefore I tend to leave error correction on.

If it consummates, the "quality" of rip doesn’t matter, only the quality of playback. Ripping usually repeats until it is "right." PB only gets one shot at it. I’ve had good success with a Pioneer BD External drive.

@lalitk Thanks so much!

“what type of CD drive is necessary/sufficient”

The one that is designed to rip CD’s. As suggested above, connect a Vault 2 via SPDIF (digital coax) cable into your Integrated DAC input. Once you finish ripping your CD’s sit back and enjoy your ripped CD’s or browse / listen thousands of songs through cloud based providers like Tidal or Qobuz.

If you want a primer on how to connect Vault to your network, search streaming in the forums. Lots of great info here.

I should back up...newbie question...what type of CD drive is necessary/sufficient?  Right now I've got a Cambridge CXC transport running into an integrated with a built in DAC.  I'm guessing the CXC won't be useful in this situation.  I should have prefaced the original question that I'm completely new to this and want to know what the complete chain looks like (hardware that reads/exports data to hardware that decodes and stores it).  Any input is appreciated.

Sony Music Center and its free:

@cjlundberg

My suggestion would be to pick up a used Bluesound Vault 2 which will serve as CD ripper, storage and streamer/DAC. One box, that does it all. And choose .wav format to rip your CD’s. How many CD’s are you looking to rip? Vault has 2TB storage which can store roughly 2856 CDs.

I owned Vault 2 for 5 years before moving on to Aurender ACS100, which offers much superior App interface to curate, metadata edits and access to my CD collection, all from iPad. 

What I use:

Express Rip

by NCH software. It’s guaranteed to be bit-perfect to kbs (killobytes).

Strangely, the same original CD-Rs ripped using Windows Media Player long ago resulted in less kbs. (overall file size) and there was a haze (almost like noise) over some tracks; whereas Express Rip was just perfect. Brand new CD-Rs were used.

Also invest in a standalone external drive or a server-grade optical drive if you’re using a desktop computer. A SSD solid state drive would be best for music. SATA III is fine, but there is even better/faster available. Hard Drives make noise. Nobody uses them anymore.

Use dBPoweramp on an inexpensive cd drive and it will make sure that your rips are bit perfect.  I ripped all of my CDs directly to my NAS and upon purchasing the Aurender N20, copied files to Aurender’s SSD, which shows up on my network like any other attached device.