Ripping CD's to hard drive


What is the highest quality way to rip a collection of CD's to a hard drive?  Does it require a high-end transport and DAC of some sort?  How have others gone about this when loading their Lumin, Aurender, etc components? 

cjlundberg

I gave up on ripping to a hard drive back at the beginning of the century. It was not a good enough sound quality for me. My ears told me the sound was not the same as on the original CD.

As far as I know DSD 512 is the highest and be warned that one song takes up more space than a whole album at 44.1 kHz

I used JRiver on my Windows 10 PC, ripped entire collection to a NAS drive. I play my collection using JRiver software through a Parasound Zdac connected to Krell Preamp and Krell Amp, and Harbeth 40.2 speakers. Inexpensive, sounds great but slow ripping process.

@8th-note 

4000 discs?  Ulp!

I can't have ripped more than 400 of my discs and that was enough.

They're now in a bag in the attic along with the rest due to lack of space. I've probably only got around 100 still left downstairs.

It's hard to get the notion that the original CDs sound the best out of your head, even if there isn't the slightest bit of evidence to support it.

Besides some of them took a lot of getting hold of, eg 2003 Blonde on Blonde, Born to Run super bit mapping gold disc, Get Happy!! (Demon) and some are perennial favourites like Astral Weeks, Abbey Road, Sgt Pepper (87) etc

 

2) It compares your rip to a database to insure that it is completely accurate. 3) It fetches the metadata from the internet so you have the album info and the artwork all together in one folder.

Sounds like good features to have.

Ever since the Creevity Cover downloader software stopped working on my W7 PC I've had to add the art manually when I can be bothered.

CDBurnerXP is what I used to use to burn compilations after normalising levels with MP3 Gain.

These days it's easier to put the music on my phone and stream via my Ifi Zen Air Bluetooth streamer.

Of course it's even easier to use something like Amazon's Alexa but somehow for me that seems to cheapen the entire experience of listening.

And then there's the feeling that it's always listening to you...