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Ripping CD's - Bypassing Computer CD Player

At the risk of sounding stupid, could someone point me in the right/best direction of how I can rip my CD's to a hard drive while maintaining fidelity? Hold on, I know how to do it with my computer and I know the difference between lossless and lossy files. My concern is that the CD players on computers are not of sufficient quality to do a really good job. I've tried to find the best CD player for my computer, but I know it's not nearly the quality of my stereo componentry. My thought is to use my "audiophile" quality CD player(s) to rip to a storage medium. Is there a component that I can attach to one of my current CD players that would seamlessly backup the CD's and/or a combination CD player/hard drive that would do the same thing?
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Showing 4 responses by knghifi

knghifi
1,668 posts
 
Kijanki - I assume bit perfect software/hardware delivery is a given. I am talking about different sound from bit identical files. There is no timing information in a digital file so the jitter comes on playback. There are lots of sources of it, as you say. But, how do you get different jitter from 2 identical files played back on the same system? It is theoretically possible, for example, if one file is contiguous and the other is badly fragmented and you computer and disk drive are really noisy. But if two bit identical files are contiguous and on the same platter on the same drive, some people will still say they sound different. That is the part I just cannot hear. Can you?
Are you talking about identical same format files (flac vs flac) or different format (flac vs wav)?

If same format, they should sound the same. Different format, then probably sound different since they are encoded differently even though both are lossless and uncompressed ... different file layout.
knghifi
1,668 posts
 
09-04-14: Kijanki

In the Absolute Sound article I mentioned, the authors said the sound go worse the more times files were converted, even if they ended up bit identical. I will say, they did get a lot of push back on that topic. However, others do report similar experiences. But, hey, if people believe they hear differences, that is up to them.

Perhaps authors are members of mentioned AA?
No doubt! If files are identical according to a binary compare, why waste time debating if they sound the same.
knghifi
1,668 posts
 
Some people claim that 2 bit for bit identical wav files will sound different if one was ripped directly to wav and the other ripped to flac and converted to wav. Same if a wav file is converted to flac and back to wav. Makes no sense to me, but some people claim they sound different.
If file is already wav, why rip again to wav? When rip wav->flac->wav, depending on the software, possible loss of precision?

To confirm integrity of 2 wav files, do a binary compare. Google binary compare ... free on all platforms.

Ripping is basically wrapping data into another format.

Comparing flac to wav, some people claim the wav sounds better because the flac has to be decompressed and the extra CPU cycles needed to do that produce electrical noise that degrades the quality of converter or DAC conntected to the USB. On my system, the cpu runs at well less than 5% while decoding flac ...
Processing a file is not CPU intensive. The most important is timing and logic (software) in processing the different file formats.

Some people claim ...
Some people claim they can hear speakers, DACs ... breaking in after 2000+ hours. Depending on my mood, how much wine had for dinner, time of day ... my system sounds different. Is this system breaking in or just product of the environment?
knghifi
1,668 posts
 
If people think they hear differences from all these things, who as I to say?
Nothing. There will never be a consensus in anything.

" When rip wav->flac->wav, depending on the software, possible loss of precision?"

That is not likely. The data is integer not floating point format.
What does not floating point have to do with potential errors? It's a software program. Data is probably processed in bytes.

People do binary compares, find the files identical, and report they sound different. At one point I spent a lot of time doing binary compares and looking a file formats.
If binary compare returns TRUE, STOP!!! Like I said, people likes to exaggerate and sometimes have no clue in not comparing apples to apples but apples to oranges as we've seen in this forum.

Some people have ripped to flac and then decided to convert to wav because they think it sounds better. Somebody then pipes in and says they should re-rip everything, since the converted wav file will not sound the same as the ripped wav file, even though they are bit for bit identical.
Where's the original wav? When you rip into another format, it doesn't overwrite the orig but just create a new copy in new format. No?

Let's not get too deep into this. There are lots of discussions on AA and other places about this and nothing ever gets resolved.
Don't worry I won't. Have NO plans jumping in AA.
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