Ripping CD's to hard drive

I used Exact Audio Copy on a Dell laptop to copy my collection to both Flac and Wav formats onto an 4TB external solid state hard drive. The hard drive feeds a Bluesound 2I and an external Dac.

What I didn't expect was that I could hear a difference between Flac and Wav playback. I don't have "golden ears" but could still hear a difference. I prefer Wav, but that's just me.

Jim S.

Perhaps we should also mention that ripping to an SSD or a USB instead of a traditional HD will not only be faster but should be more reliable in the long term?

SSDs now also come in a similar form as RAM sticks (the ultra fast NVMe PCIe 3.0/4.0) and USB is up to version 3.

Surprisingly there’s also some evidence that SSDs in order to function optimally need at least as much free space as traditional hard drives do (10%).

USB sticks are generally reliable and I’ve haven't experienced any problems with them apart from a couple of cheap ones off eBay I was using in the car and carelessly removed before turning the media player off.

In both cases the USB stick was left totally unresponsive. It wasn’t too big a deal because they were both backed up at least twice.

All good solutions.

+1 Exact Audio Copy & +1 dbpoweramp on my HP notebook with a cd drive.

Store them on an SSD from Crucial Technology in a plastic drive case from Amazon.

Linked via USB cable - PC to cd drive to rip.

Linked via USB cable - SSD to Streamer / Player.

Several SSD’s for backup.

Permits using any streamer / player and DAC.

Very simple, inexpensive, reliable and flexible.

Get your SSD’s here:

Get your cases here:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ssd+case+enclosure&crid=3VB4SN9C8SHN6&sprefix=ssd+case%2Caps%2C108&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_2_8

Very simple, inexpensive, reliable and flexible.

A bit off topic....

As a tech novice, I'd like to find an easy was to rip my SACD discs and get the DSD layer to my Server/PC.

It appears the "easiest" is finding an old OPPO and using complex software & networking techniques. 

Is there a 1-stop solution - i.e. insert the SACD disk and directly send DSD layer to a PC?