Converting cd's to high resolution audio

I concur w/ Elizabeth, in that, there is an incredible amount of information stored/locked onto a CD or SACD. Historically, there have been a few players that possessed an ability to unlock ,  retrieve, the data in those pits and lands. The new Marantz SA-10 is such a player and relative bargain compared to the top-tier Esoteric (both actual brand) and other  spinners in the $15K to 50K neighborhood. 

Secondly, the DAC has come of age and properly matched w/ the best transport (C.E.C and other brands) offers the listener a never before musical experience.
Happy Listening!

I can’t think of ANY CD’s that have become unplayable (collecting since 1985). I do have a few DVDs that have gone bad or bad from the get-go (complete series of M*A*S*H had a few drop outs as did the Robo-Cop set).

" All my music is on cd's and my reading tells me that the cd itself has a limited shelf life and will degrade over time.
Any recommendations about converting my cd's to FLAC or some type of high quality music files. Not looking for
compressed files.
I see products such as the Blue Sound Music Vault and a Sony High Resolution Music Player.
Does anybody have any thoughts about how to accomplish this goal?"

I use dBPoweramp and a plain Jane Windows PC with a CDROM. I rip to FLAC files and store on a hard drive. Works like a champ, and these CDs have never sounded better. I play back through a Bryston BDP-1 and a Bryston DAC.

And BTW, I tried to measure the so called "CD rot" effect and found some evidence using Plextor error detection software on a few very old, first generation (early 80's) Redbook CDs that I had. These CDs are now almost 40 years old, and when scanned using the Plextor utility, found significant BERs (bit error rates). Ironically though, these same CDs, when ripped with dBPoweramp on the same Plextor CDROM, came out "bit perfect" with no indicated errors whatsoever. So from a practical viewpoint, I would not worry too much about degradation in your CDs. In fact, the solid state HD, thumbdrive, or SATA HDD you use to store your ripped music will probably fail before your CDs go bad due to CD rot.

CDs are encoded at 16 bits with a sampling rate of 44.1khz.  Your not pulling more information off the disk than what is there.

If you want to convert to DSD and you like the change in sound that provides, great. If you have one DAC you prefer over another, that is great. If you want to tout better sound due to reduction in jitter, better clocking, superior analog output stages, fine. But please don't provide misinformation about retrieving "more data", your simply not.

I did 500 CD’s on a single PC using MediaMonkey. No issues at all.

Might be worth building a mini-PC just to do ripping, compared to the high-end offerings. :) 

Best,

E