Ripping CD's to hard drive

@flyfish77

In some instances, I have purchased FLAC downloads of some of the same albums that I have ripped. In most cases there are minimal if any differences in sound quality between the AIFF files and the higher resolution FLAC files. When there are differences in sound quality, it appears to be due to the source being remastered versions of older albums.

Yes, different mastering is usually the biggest difference.

On sites like Amazon Music you can compare different masterings, and hardly any of them sound the same.

What bothers me is that some of them can initially sound better on less ambitious speaker systems, and then worse on more revealing full scale ones.

I spent some time comparing the remastered Beach Boys 1993 Good Vibrations box set with their remastered 1999 Greatest Hits, Vol. 1: 20 Good Vibrations after reading about both on the Steve Hoffman music forum.

The former sounded better on the better system.

Listening to them on headphones was something different yet again.

Without a reliable reference source of material (or playback equipment), it is tricky to come to any worthwhile lasting conclusions.

In comparison, the difference in bitrate is usually insignificant.

I have ripped my entire CD collection of over 4000 discs so speed and convenience were of paramount importance. It took me over two years to do it. Here are the tools I used and why:

Laptop PC and External Drive - I ripped the files to an external 4 TB SATA drive. It's important that the PC and the drive both have SATA 3 interfaces. This isn't because it affects the ripping speed but it is critical when backing up that drive to other external drives. I have the original drive and two backups. If I ever lose this data I will have to call the suicide hotline.

Plextor Plexwriter PX-891SAF-PLUS-R Burner Drive - When I started my project I was using the internal drive of my ASUS ROG gaming laptop. It was painfully slow and I read that using a Plextor external CD drive would be much faster. OMG! - it is faster by a factor of 3 or 4. The speed difference is huge depending on the CD. If you have a lot of discs to rip this is an absolute requirement. Best 45 bucks I ever spent.

OWC Pro 5.25" Drive Enclosure - Because this was such a big project I bought the best hardware I could find. This is an excellent durable enclosure and costs about 60 bucks. That's more than the stupid drive but I'm a big spender.

dB Poweramp - After a considerable amount of research I settled on dB Poweramp. It has several features that I felt were critical: 1) It has the option of ripping an uncompressed FLAC file. Even though FLAC is a lossless codec I didn't want to take any chances on quality. By ripping uncompressed files the CPU of the playback device doesn't have to work as hard. Drive space is cheap and I ain't takin' any chances. 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. 4) It recognizes HDCD discs (you have to enable this feature) and rips them at 20 bits to take advantage of their higher dynamic range. I have several hundred HDCDs and this feature was critical to me. 5) It's easy to use.

I still have my CDs and I have compared at least a couple dozen of them to the ripped files using the same DAC. I'm using a PSA PerfectWave Mk II DAC and a PerfectWave transport. I haven't been able to hear any difference between the original CD and the FLAC file.

If you only have a few CDs to rip then it doesn't matter as much what you use but if you have a large CD collection putting together a good ripping rig will save you countless hours of tedium.

+1 for EAC.  Used it for my entire collection of over 500 CD's.  It's sometimes a bit wonky on tagging (to identify album and track info) so I 'scrubbed' with MediaMonkey, but any other decent tagging program will do.

I would recommend ripping only to FLAC, hard drive space is pretty cheap today.... Exact Audio Copy is good, but I found it a bit clunky to use. I have had very good results with Fairstars CD Ripper too. Fairstars is very good at tagging except for more obscure titles.  Oh yes, MP3 Tag is great for cleaning up your library

Agree - FLAC is the way to go - I use twinned 3 Tb NAS drives. The images take up a fair bit of space on top of the music. I am also a dBPoweramp user.