Ripping hardware

@kraftwerkturbo 

Ripping CDs may be done on any hardware.  It will not affect the sound quality.  Hardware affects the sound quality when you play the ripped files.

What might affect the sound quality is the ripping program, although I never experimented nor have I ever read that any particular program results in better or worse sound quality.

All ripping software should yield the same sound quality results, because the software is reading the PCM bits contained in the data on the CD, and writing those bits to a file.

Of course, specify a lossless format when ripping, such as flac, wav, alac (and I believe that there are others).  Do not rip to the mp3 format.

flac is probably the best choice, because it offers lossless compression, and it supports loads of metadata (not sure how much, but I believe it is a value that you will never exceed).  You can rip to flac with zero compression, too.

Note that the compression is not what the studio's personnel do, that robs music of its dynamics (loudness wars).  flac file compression is akin to zip file compression.  When you retrieve the files within a zip file, nothing is lost.  When flac and alac compress the files, nothing is lost.

The wav format is not compressed, and offers little metadata tagging.

I use the wav format when I play music in my Honda Accord, via a USB flash drive.  The lousy front-end unit in the Accord has trouble with flac files.  When I skip to the next song, it take 3 seconds.  So skipping ahead or back a few songs is maddening.  With wav files, there is no delay.  But I lose the artist’s name, due to metadata loss with the wav format.  If not for the song skipping delay, I would not be using the wav format.

alac is probably your best bet if you are playing those music files on Apple hardware.

Transports, cable upgrades, clocking and the rest, matter only for playback.

I use dbpoweramp to rip my cds and there is no difference in the metadata between wav and flac.

https://cloudinary.com/guides/front-end-development/all-about-aiff-and-how-it-compares-to-wav-and-mp3

Limited Metadata. Unlike some other formats, WAV files don’t support extensive metadata, which can be a bit of a setback for those who like their audio files detailed with info.

https://www.cambridgeaudio.com/usa/en/blog/metadata-digital-audio-files-%E2%80%93-what-it-where-it-and-how-tidy-it

FLAC, AIFF and MP3 formats take full advantage of metadata whereas WAV files only allow a little metadata input, so not as helpful for browsing your library.

This (below) appears to explain why my Honda Accord has no problem playing my wav files, but blows it with the metadata:

https://wavmetadata.blogspot.com/

Any well-behaved WAV reader is able to handle every WAV file even if it doesn't understand all the chunks it contains, in which case it simply ignores them.

The metadata is stored in a wav file's "chunks", and apparently my Accord ignores them.

You might have no issues with wav file's metadata storage, or maybe you will have issues.  With the flac format, you should not have any metadata issues.  And any decent digital file player will easily handle flac files.  My Honda Accord's stereo is an exception, when it comes to changing songs that are flac encoded.  It plays the songs just fine.  But is has that awful 3-second delay.  So I use wav files in my car, and lose my metadata.

Glad to hear that no 'gazillion $ pixel dust' is needed for ripping hardware. 

I uaes EAC (Exaxct Audio Copy). 

I've used EAC with many different drives over the last 20+ years. Some were better than others but all were functional with the end result being good rips.