Digital Audio for Dummies

Echolane,

From my own experience, classical tags are painful. I just finished re-tagging all my classical music. What is out there, on the Internet and automatic tagging services, is beyond inconsistent. If you are picky about it, you are in for frustration. If you just want an album and will play it from the beginning and never look at the screen, you will be happy. In short, good luck with that. Not to mention that some of the programs will put some albums together as one because they have same name (Mahler 4th symphony, for example). That is another topic, I guess.

As far as transferring LPs to digital format goes, I recently bought Korg DS DAC 10 R (or some combination of these letters, I do not have it here right now) and ripped some DSD files from LPs. I cannot claim that I have the world's best system to play it on, but it sounds good enough that I did not regret. There may be better programs to do it, but I used Korg's own and it takes some learning if you are not a computer-wired soul.

There are many options on the market and I am sure each has some advantages. For a two-channel (well, those DSDs from LPs are actually mono) person who does not want to have the computer in his system permanently and prefers semi-traditional approach with a dedicated player, SONY is quite fine. Check other ones recommended in the thread and see and hear what suits you.

In case it means anything to anyone, it seems that Bluesound does not play DSD files. Auralic Aries does and seems to be way more advanced. Still, it also seem to require NAS somewhere else in the home and is not a dedicated music player. Please let me/us know if this is incorrect as I just looked it up on their websites and might have not picked every detail right.

For the ripping part Windows has a program called Windows Media Player built in that can rip audio cd's to mp3 (or wav). If you want something better and still easy to use you could check out dbPoweramp. It costs money but seems to be very easy and effective.

After having ripped your cd's you will have a lot of file on hard drives and then you'll have to decide how to play those. An easy solution is to get a dac with usb input and connect it directly to your computer. If your computer is in another room you may need to buy a separate one just for audio but that is not as expensive as good hifi equipment. You can also get some streaming solution but that is a bit more work. The cheapest ones are based on Raspberry Pi and comes prebuilt but you still has to be technical to connect everything.

Some sites, like Hans Beekhuyzen's has more info about what you can use to play music from computers.
http://thehbproject.com/en/

Appreciate all the feedback.  Obviously there's a lot to learn. 

amg56, over time I hope I can give more specifics but I'm in a learning phase and it's a bit difficult right now to give more specifics.  I'm sure in time I will.

One immediate question is sound quality.  It seems that a $29 optical drive isn't going to read CD's as accurately as what I have now.  I would hate to go through all the work of ripping all these CD's and then have digital data with less integrity than what I have now.  At least owners of megabuck transports might question this. An extension of this question might be this--Do some feel that their sound is BETTER after they went through this transition. (I suppose it's possible if less jitter, better DAC, etc.  But if just feeding a digital signal  say to the Lyngdorf, it seems the best you would do is equal, but not better).