Storing Cd's on Hard Disk


Hi,

What kind of quality CD driver is needed to rip CD's to HD?

Does the quality of the driver have an impact on the end result if one is saving in a lossless format?

I have read comments that using the CD driver of a Mac is as good as any CD transport if objective is to rip to HD.

Comments welcomed as intend to load all my CD's to HD in the near future.

Thanks
Tim
timnaim
I have to take issue with one of Ckrody's comments above. AIFF handles metadata tags quite nicely. WAV does not.

And while lossless formats, such as Apple Lossless, return bit-perfect files, there is a growing number of people who believe the conversion back to uncompressed data streams can cause some sonic degradation, depending on how your computer audio system is set up, the speed of your processor, and so forth. I haven't been able to confirm this myself, but I decided to rip my CDs in AIFF just to be safe. In any case, converting from Lossless to AIFF is something you can do very easily from within iTunes.

I remain unconvinced that EAC offers any meaningful benefits over iTunes for ripping. Some people think it does, but it's hard to see how. Error correction in iTunes works sufficiently well that it's really the least of your worries when it comes to the sound quality of a computer audio system. How you get it out of the computer and how that process eventually talks to the DAC is where the action is.
There's actually menu item in iTunes to convert a song to AIFF. Under the Advanced menu, it gives you choices to "Create iPod or iPhone version", "Create Apple TV version" and "Create AIFF version". But I haven't looked into these functions so perhaps they are not what they seem.
I don't wish to muddy the waters, but I have multiple instances where two errorless WAVs of the same cd sound quite different. In one instance it is a cd with and without AVM spray painted label. The others use a Millennium CD disc used on the cd during ripping.

This makes no sense to me but it is worth it to me. I have reripped nearly all discs on my hard drives.

I misspoke earlier. The Apple files were both lossless and AIFF not FLAC.
Tbg, I'm not clear about what you are saying. You re-ripped nearly all of your discs -- why? And what did you do differently the second time?