Ripping CD's to hard drive

I have used:

1) itunes to both a computer and external HD with an Apple Optical reade

2) dbPoweramp with same Optical ripper

3) Bluesound Vault

4) Melco ripper with Melco server

Truthfully, at least decent results with all.  The best is the Melco.  Not only do the rips sound great when replayed on the Melco but on other servers as well.  Detail, open sounding, and a perfect rip every time

.  The Vault would get the bottom score as occasional rip will have several seconds of error and there is a general lack of bloom and air around the instruments 

  I tunes sounded decent but was also error prone.  dbPoweramp with an Apple ripper was an eye opener as the errors were eliminated and everything sounded more incisive.  It is the best value for a tight budget.  But man, that Melco…

Another vote for Exact Audio Copy. I’ve ripped 1650 disks so far. 

@sd40 

Exact Audio Copy does flac as well, but you have to get a plug in.  All my older “mono” rips are in flac.

Never rip to anything less than flac or aiff. Disk is so cheap and getting cheaper every day. 

I just used my PC CD player and FreeRIP to make 16/44 flac files.  There is no advantage to upsampling. I tried EAC. It's very slow and I could not hear any difference. "Bit perfect" is a bit of a fools errand. Even the factory CDs and players are not bit perfect and 99 times out of a 100 the dropouts are too small to be audible. Every part of the reproduction chain can have drop outs. There is no retry strategy or error correction  built into USB, SPDIF, AES etc nor I2S, only ethernet.