2. digital
  3. 168489-3573

Who is ditching their shiny disc spinners?

I want to upgrade my digital side … (currently Bluesound Vault 2i feeding the DAC of Oppo 105) … plan to spend around $2k … since I’ve ripped all my CDs to the Vault, thinking of spending it all on a DAC, and retire/sell the Oppo while it still has some value. I do have a few older CDPs I could retain as backup, but not sure why I would ever need.

Alternatively, was considering a better combined CDP/DAC like a newer Marantz or Yamaha … upgrades DAC performance some, and a reliable spinner for quite a few more years … but I have very few SACDs, so feeling like this would be the tail wagging the dog.

In what direction have you been migrating?
inscrutable

Showing 2 responses by ian_of_glos

ian_of_glos
9 posts
 
Why would you want to create a computer file when you already own the CD? I cannot see any advantages other than a saving in rack space. 99% of all the music I listen to is on CD or SACD, and I cannot see the point of converting them to computer files or ditching my CD player. Although I do own a Bluesound Node 2i and I have a few FLAC files stored on its USB drive, this is limited to music that is not available on CD. So far I have only used 12GB from a 128GB USB drive and although it sounds reasonably good it is nowhere near as good as music played on the CD player.
ian_of_glos
9 posts
 
Johnspain - I am pleased to hear that you have had no problems when ripping CDs on your Cocktailaudio X45Pro. However, when I have tried to rip CDs I have always encountered problems. It takes around 20 minutes to rip one CD and as I have over 2,500 CDs in my collection it will take me over 830 hours to do them all. So it is a very laborious and time consuming activity, but the main problem is that the resulting file is never the same as the original CD. For example, none of the software I have used has been able to deal with gapless tracks correctly. It always either inserts a gap where none is required, or deletes a couple of seconds of music at the start of each track. At the very least there is a noticeable click when it moves on to the next track, which can be very distracting. Also, I have 130 SACDs in my collection. It is not possible to rip them because they are copy protected, so that would mean downgrading all my SACDs to CD quality. SACDs sound significantly better than similar recordings on CD so I do not want to downgrade them.
The last problem is that the software I have used never labels the music correctly. For example, when I ripped a 2 CD set the first CD was put in a folder with the name of the composer but the second CD was put in a folder with the name of the pianist. So when the process had finished I had to rename the second file and move it to the composer folder. This makes the whole process very messy and labour intensive.
Just out of interest - what was your main reason for deciding to convert your CDs to computer files? I can see few benefits.  
More to discover