Does a ripped cd onto a digital format sound better than the cd played on the cdp

Depends on your digital hardware and software and your CD transport hardware.  Whichever delivers the lower jitter and does not muck with the bits or the offset, that one will sound the best.

In general, off-the-shelf transports have higher jitter than that possible with digital hardware.  This is particularly true if the digital is a low-jitter Ethernet interface. In fact, very few digital interfaces deliver this low jitter, but it is available if you know what to buy.  USB is more problematic than Ethernet, but it can be excellent too.

Not that you cannot achieve low jitter with a Transport.  All it takes is adding a reclocker to your Transport, like the Synchro-Mesh and you will have parity with the very best digital computer playback.

Steve N.

Empirical Audio

+1 with Ivan.
My experience has been that moving CDs to hard drive results in a slight decrease in sq.  Perhaps Ivan has identified the reason.  Streaming at “CD quality “ takes sq down another two notches.

Let's not mislead people.  Ivan is talking about playback using digital, not moving files from one place to another, or ripping.  Moving files will never degrade the track SQ. A good ripper will check other rips and make sure it is a clean rip and that the offset is correct.  This is a non-problem.

On the other hand, playback of any digital source over cables can and will degrade the SQ a tiny bit, depending on the cables and interfaces.  Usually not data errors, but added jitter.  Jitter is a degradation in timing and this can be fixed in a number of different ways before and inside the DAC.

Steve N.

Empirical Audio

Yes, that's exactly it. It's counter intuitive. For an explanation see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grzoqEb2KMk&feature=youtu.be

This is a good explanation of how poor digital signal integrity can cause uncorrectable errors in playback.  It has nothing to do with "analog". all signals are indeed analog, but this is about signal integrity and noise.

The fact is that most digital cable connections using S/PDIF experience very low error rates.  If you have bad ground-loops and very poor cabling of long or very short lengths,  it might happen though.  The best rule of thumb is to use 1.25-1.5m long cabling if high-quality (low loss and low dielectric absorption).  Always use coax terminated in BNC connectors with 75 ohm RCA adapters as needed.  See this white-paper I wrote years ago:

https://positive-feedback.com/Issue14/spdif.htm

Steve N.

Empirical Audio