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


I had been using the cd drive in my old laptop to rip cds to my external hard drive.  I have since bought a new laptop that does not have a cd drive.  To get a cd into the computer I am using a cheap external disc reader.  What are you guys using to spin those silver discs into hard drives?  I think I need something better than what I have, but I don't think I want to spend thousands of dollars to buy a disc drive.  My budget would be less than $1,000,

What do you think?

kenrus
What I have found. No rip sounds as good as the CD. I’ve tried everything including upsampling them to higher bits. I know it the rave now, but I found my CD’s sound just great on my Esoteric K01 as well as my old vinyl that I can enjoy at times. But I listen to my vast CD collection more and I enjoy it as much. I know TAS and the rest rag on CD’s as much as they can because they know old folks are not going to stream or rip and vinyl is what they have and grew up with and tech folks and younger grew up with downloading and streaming. But in my view if you have a good number of CD’s then put the money into a excellent CD player and enjoy and keep buying! I just listened to the Beatles anthology 3 and some tracks my wife yelled to me Honey they sounded like they are in the room. She is not a phile. I been in audio 35 years and owned tube and solid state vast vinyl and in 1993 when digital got much better in CD’s and the discs I own would never have be found in vinyl nor released even today. CD was great for the major company’s to release so many titles the likes which we may never see again. Enjoy music and keep collecting and don’t let those in the rags tell you because what they say about brittle harsh CD I don’t find that to be true. And I place no truth in them anymore. Their are a sales tool now and many follow their word. Your sound is never better that the source and production and mastering quality. Vinyl is not better than a CD, problem with early digital was technology and understanding and like any medium including vinyl as medthods and recording quality got better so did the sound. Golden age was 50’s through mid 60’s then more tracks and compression used, till today you rarely have a group in the studio recording together. It's the mastering that is the issue not the format and is always the case vinyl included. 
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.