What are you using to rip your cds to a hard drive?

If your external drive is one of the "slim" types I would replace it with one that uses the kind of 5.25 inch drive mechanism that is used in desktop computers. Such as this OWC Mercury Pro, for $69.75. Or, alternatively, you could purchase an Asus bare drive or other high quality 5.25 inch bare drive from Newegg.com for less than $20, and put it in an inexpensive external drive enclosure that provides a SATA internal interface and a USB external interface. Many such enclosures are available at Newegg.

The reason I make that suggestion is that I’ve found that various slim external drives, and also optical drives that are built into laptops, often have problems reading discs that are in less than perfect condition. While those same discs will be read by inexpensive 5.25 inch drives with no problem.

I also concur with the others that the software that is chosen should assure bit perfect copying.

Regards,
-- Al

+1 on dbPoweramp and as usual Al give good advice on the actual disc drive part of your question.

Bedt bang for the buck and then some.
A tech st Bryston turned me on to it D B power amp .

JRiver Media Centre 20

What I have found. No rip sounds as good as the CD. I’ve tried everything including upsampling them to higher bits. I know it the rave now, but I found my CD’s sound just great on my Esoteric K01 as well as my old vinyl that I can enjoy at times. But I listen to my vast CD collection more and I enjoy it as much. I know TAS and the rest rag on CD’s as much as they can because they know old folks are not going to stream or rip and vinyl is what they have and grew up with and tech folks and younger grew up with downloading and streaming. But in my view if you have a good number of CD’s then put the money into a excellent CD player and enjoy and keep buying! I just listened to the Beatles anthology 3 and some tracks my wife yelled to me Honey they sounded like they are in the room. She is not a phile. I been in audio 35 years and owned tube and solid state vast vinyl and in 1993 when digital got much better in CD’s and the discs I own would never have be found in vinyl nor released even today. CD was great for the major company’s to release so many titles the likes which we may never see again. Enjoy music and keep collecting and don’t let those in the rags tell you because what they say about brittle harsh CD I don’t find that to be true. And I place no truth in them anymore. Their are a sales tool now and many follow their word. Your sound is never better that the source and production and mastering quality. Vinyl is not better than a CD, problem with early digital was technology and understanding and like any medium including vinyl as medthods and recording quality got better so did the sound. Golden age was 50’s through mid 60’s then more tracks and compression used, till today you rarely have a group in the studio recording together. It's the mastering that is the issue not the format and is always the case vinyl included.