What are you using to rip your cds to a hard drive?

I use Music Bee....surprisingly a free download. Supports just about every high-rez format...including SACD rips. I’m ripped my entire CD collection to FLAC. It is now all on a 2TB hard drive plugged into my Oppo 105D.

I use an iMac with an external Apple disc drive to to rip my CD's to FLAC files via DB Power Amp software.  I use the $39 premium version instead of the free version and it WILL repair inaccurate frames if you choose to use the Secure Rip feature.  This may sound like a lot of work, but I place Still Points under the disc drive and a weight on top of it, then clean each disc and give it a "spin" in my Bedini Ultra Clarifier (the physics are a complete mystery to me!) before inserting the disc.

Once the rip is complete, I transfer the FLAC file to the hard drive of my Aurender A10 music server and play it through the A10's built in DAC.  (The A10 is the only Aurender server with a built in DAC.)  I find the SQ to be as good as, or in some cases, better than the sound of those same CD's played on my Esoteric X-05  CD player.  The X05 is not in same league with Phillyb's K-01, so I'm not claiming my ripping process and the Aurender's DAC will sound as good as his K-01.  However, the X-05 is no slouch and when you throw in the convenience of playing all of your CD's at the touch of your finger...well, I'm a happy camper!

Oh, BTW, the A10 streams Tidal HiFi and is fully MQA certified. 

Nothing beats an exact copy. Apple lossless copy format will sound identical to the cd. If you have the cheapest apple computer and their $200 plug in USB disk drive the operating system can copy a cd to an apple lossless file with automatic rereads of any data that is bad
it isn't possible to get better than exact
jeff

I use a Bluesound Vault 2 to rip to Flac. Played back through my Vault or one of my Nodes, it sounds much better than any of my CD players, which admittedly, aren’t high end. But I suspect that the "bit perfect" rip and the quite good on board DAC is competitive with most CD players regardless of price.

Your "cheap external disc reader" is most likely more than sufficient, unless either -
A) the disc reader malfunctions every now and then OR 
B) you got infected by the upgrade bug and you really want to get rid of that $1,000 :)

I would second Exact Audio Copy (free) or any other bit perfect ripper, suggested by others, to have the best digital files though.