Ripping CD's to hard drive


What is the highest quality way to rip a collection of CD's to a hard drive?  Does it require a high-end transport and DAC of some sort?  How have others gone about this when loading their Lumin, Aurender, etc components? 

cjlundberg

I can’t believe that some are talking about ripping to mp3!? I don’t even rip to FLAC, I choose AIFF or WAV. I mean, storage is not a problem, so why bother with FLAC. If you can’t hear the difference between mp3 and a lossless file type, you need your ears tested. 
 

Exact Audio Copy works for me. Any CDR. Rip to harddrive (select lossless/no compression, evn so I have not been able to find difference between FLAC and lossless). Once on harddrive, move/copy to any player (network drive, external USB3 harddrive, USB drive, etc should NOT matter). 

From there, feed your DAC. I currently run LONG USB3 cable from computer to DAC and keep the DAC close the the analog parts of the system, based on the assumption that digital signal is less degrading over distance compared to analog. Altenrative would be short USB to DAC, then LONG analog cable to pre amp/integrated amp. 

 

I have been ripping to WAV using dBpoweramp but wanted to change to FLAC because I read that it is less susceptible to being corrupted when played. When I rip a CD, however, I run the rip through TT-DR Offline, which adds the dynamic range analysis to the rip folder. I found that TT-DR Offline will accept WAV but not FLAC. So back to WAV.

Fubar 2000 - It's freeware and works fine.

Just use any PC with an optical drive.  Store them on your computer, NAS, portable SS drive, etc.