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Ripping CD's to SSD?

OK, so be patient here with me, I am an "old" 68 year old audiophile from the 1980’s dealing with new technology. I was away from the Audio Scene for 20 years until I came back in 2021. SO I’ve updated most of my equipment. One of those updates is an Aurender N200, which I got this April. I added a Samsung SSD drive to it and was thinking I may like to rip a few CD’s to it for the sake of comparison vs streaming Qobuz.

 

Please understand when ya all start mentioning file types and all that I am in the weeds. I am behind the tiems.

 

What I can tell you is i have a 10 year old Macbook Pro running OS 10.14.6 Mojave. I have the external Apple CD drive. How do i go about placing the CD into the drive, attaching a USB cable to the Aurender and getting the file loaded onto the Aurender Samsung drive? Do I need any special software? Dom i just stick the CD into the drive and the Aurender is found on my laptop and i select it as the location for the file. Like I said this is all so new to me, I want to learn. I’d like to see how i like this compared to listening through my CEC Tl1x. If the explanation gets technical you will lose me, go slow and walk me through it if you are willing. And thank you!

 

You can see my system in my profile. New speakers are on order to arrive soon!

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Showing 2 responses by blisshifi

blisshifi's avatar
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blisshifi
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@fthompson251 I would also consider the transport and digital cable you are using to contribute to the quality of the digital file. Just as an audiophile transport can improve the sound of a CD by delivering less noise and vibration that translates to jitter, the same applies to cd ripping. 

I myself just used a basic external with methods discussed on this chain and have been very happy, until Aurender sent me an A30 on my request to evaluate and review. I have been using the built in ripper in that unit and the tracks I’m ripping with it sound better than the ones I ripped years ago with the external PC drive. The tracks deliver a slightly lower noise floor, larger soundstage, and a bit more tonal density. Add it all up and it’s noticeable. 

This shouldn’t dissuade you from ripping using an external CD drive, but just wanted to share my recent learnings. 

blisshifi's avatar
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blisshifi
1,117 posts
 

@fthompson251 I would prefer to rip to my local hard drive and then copy direct to the Aurender unit or to the thumb drive anyways. The reason for this is that the internal disk’s writing speed is much faster and reliable to ripping direct to a thumb drive or network drive. I may be superstitious but it might be a way of ensuring a slightly lower noise floor in the ripping process, and I don’t mind copying the files to their destination after. 

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