Ripping CD's to hard drive

It requires a decent machine (cheap if refurbished), foobar2000 (free), and the drive to learn how to use it (also free). That’s it. Then you can rip away into any format, bit depth or sample rate you want.

ps don't rip to an HD; use a fast SSD, M2 if possible. If you can't boot M2, mount one on a caddy and put it on the PCIE bus for music storage. The fast access will leave more time for your music processing. And foobar2000 has a ramdisk component so you can put your tracks into RAM for even faster access.

I agree with the recommendation  to use dbPowerAmp.   It uses AccurateRip that checks against a reference database to ensure what's ripped is exactly what's on the CD, even for different pressings of the disc.  So if the software says it's perfect when it's done you have a bit-perfect representation.  The other goodness of using AccurateRIp is that it doesn't matter which optical drive you use to rip, it will be the same.

As to format, just rip to FLAC;  it's a non-lossy format so you know the bits fed to your streamer will be exactly the same as you pulled from the CD.   Yes, it's a few bytes more than MP3, but the big deal ripping your CD collection is the time that it takes, not the bytes it takes up.  A 12 TB hard drive is about $240 these days, so cost isn't the issue

dbPoweramp will also put the right metadata automatically in your rips, so your streamer/amp will show information about the track on the display, which is very handy.

Finally make backups of your collection so you don't lose all that work.   Costco sells a nice 5TB USB portable drive for $100; it works well for this purpose.  Backups also help if you accidentally delete stuff as you're tweaking your collection.

Foobar as mentioned does a decent job ripping, and it's free.   It can do some amazing things with plugs-ins including SACD's rip files which I just learned about last weekend.  But it doesn't do AccurateRip, and it's ability to pull Metadata from the internet is limited.

Finally, you don't need a fast computer to do any of this.  The size of the files is so small that as long as your PC was built this century it will have the horsepower to do what you need.

Take any PC, plug in any cd-rom drive. Download dbpoweramp onto your pc. This is an external program that costs a small amount. Plug in a usb hard drive into the pc. Tell dbpoweramp to rip to FLAC standard. Tell dbpoweramp where to store the ripped files (to the usb hard drive you just inserted). Put the cd into the cd drive. Dbpoweramp will identify the album and rip it. 
It is so easy. 
 

I can’t believe that some are talking about ripping to mp3!? I don’t even rip to FLAC, I choose AIFF or WAV. I mean, storage is not a problem, so why bother with FLAC. If you can’t hear the difference between mp3 and a lossless file type, you need your ears tested. 
 

Exact Audio Copy works for me. Any CDR. Rip to harddrive (select lossless/no compression, evn so I have not been able to find difference between FLAC and lossless). Once on harddrive, move/copy to any player (network drive, external USB3 harddrive, USB drive, etc should NOT matter). 

From there, feed your DAC. I currently run LONG USB3 cable from computer to DAC and keep the DAC close the the analog parts of the system, based on the assumption that digital signal is less degrading over distance compared to analog. Altenrative would be short USB to DAC, then LONG analog cable to pre amp/integrated amp.