Best Way to Upgrade Digital

For low-cost CD ripping: there's a free program called "Exact Audio Copy" to rip your CDs using a Windows PC. Very important to use care with the program settings to get the best resolution with the ripped files.

A step up from this is JRiver Media Center software, which has an easy-to- use CD ripper. JRiver starts at around $60 and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It works well to maintain and play a digital music library, and it has video capability.
Down side for both is the time involved to rip 3,000+ CDs. A good project for a Covid-19 lockdown...

I ripped my collection of 4000+ CDs and before I started I did some research about the best way to do it. I had an ASUS gaming laptop that I set up next to my listening chair and I used dBpoweramp for the ripping. If you rip to FLAC it will retrieve the meta data for each CD and automatically put it with the music files. It also has a feature that will detect a HDCD and rip it at 20 bits (you have to activate this feature).

The most important thing, however, is that I bought a Plextor Plexwriter PX-891SAF burner along with a high quality external case to hook up to my ASUS using a USB3 cable. This writer is well known to be much faster than a built-in burner in a server or a standard CD burner. In my case it is at least 4 to 5 times faster than the built-in CD burner in my ASUS. If you've got several thousand CDs to rip, speed is really important. I ripped the files to an external USB3 4 TB hard drive. For safety I have backed up my files to two other external drives.

My setup allowed me to listen to music and rip a dozen or more CDs per session. It took me nearly 3 years to get the whole job done but it was a good way to do it. You definitely don't want to be getting up and down to load every CD into the burner.

I'm an Innuos fan (Zenith MK3) popping the CD's in and out while I listen to music and it does 99% of the tagging correctly.

You could go Zen Mini

ZenithMK3, USB--> Matrix 2 SPDIF(separate LPS), i2s--> Gustard X26 Pro DAC, XLR-->

Then that all goes to my system

I ripped my 2,000 CDs over a period of years. Then upgraded my streamer and no longer listen to my CDs or ripped CDs. Copying files from a CD allows them to be streamed (ripping). So, this is basically making them available to a streamer. So if you buy a CP player, you are taking away funds that could go to a streamer. With good equipment there is no difference between a CD, ripped CD file on a server or local storage, or streamed from a service like Qobuz. Actually Qobuz frequently sounds better and costs about what the purchase of a single CD per month, $14.99), while your library goes nearly to infinite.


So, if you understand the term sunk cost… that is your CD collection. Mine is now used for wall sound dampening. So, instead of investing more in a transport, better to invest in the highest quality streamer. Which of course requires an appropriate DAC, but then so does a CD transport.

Replace the benchmark with a neutral sounding dac, the benchmark was known to be far too cool sounding (shrill), I would walk into a music room at a show and I could tell they were using a benchmark and walked right out