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Transport rips to hard drive?

ok, i gather that most people going PC Audio are ripping CDs from their desktop/laptop to their hard drive. seems the trouble there could be a flimsy transport in the desk/laptop that causes a less than optimal rip.

better way is if you could read the CD with a dedicated, audiophool approved transport and then send its output directly to the hard drive, or to the PC as a digital stream for it to input and it encode to the hard drive.

is it possible for either:
A) an external HD to accept a transport's digital stream directly (i doubt it)
B) a PC to accept a digital input stream for it to use as data to be burned to a hard drive?

programs / hardware / IO board recommendations are welcome!
thx
128x128rhyno
cerrot's avatar
cerrot
1,700 posts
 
When I decided to rip my music, I was concerned with the PC transport in my rig. I decided to go with an outbiard Lacie firewire CD burner, which is only used for ripping. I don't use the PC's drive to rip at all. My FLAC files sound very god and I never had an error or reliability problem. Definitely worth the small investment. It seems faster than the onboard, and, while I can't say I compared the sound off the two, it is very convenient having the CD transport on your desk at your fingertips when you're in for a few hours of ripping. The firewire also doesn't drain CPU cycles.
ballan
184 posts
 
If you have a Mac, DO NOT use AAC. AAC is compressed. Use Apple Lossless for the best quality.
jax2
3,031 posts
 
If you have a Mac, DO NOT use AAC. AAC is compressed. Use Apple Lossless for the best quality.

I would recommend Apples non-compressed format, AIFF, if you are on a Mac. Also MAX software has vigorous error correction (discussed above) which will take longer to rip with, but is the best guarantee of bit-for-bit rips. I don't think the error correction in iTunes is as good. I've had disks that MAX takes very long to rip that iTunes seems to blast right through with error correction turned on. External drives/transports may be slower than internal, even if both drives share the same specs, depending entirely upon the interface they have to your computer. I think the software's error-correction will be more important than the drive (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
audioengr
3,282 posts
 
Transports are used to achieve real-time low-jitter. This is not required for a good rip, only a clean error-free data read. Transports with the lowest jitter may not be the best ripping drives due to error correction and offset.

However, the CDROM drives in laptops and desktops are generally inferior to the best ripping CDROM drives. There have been studies, notably by RIPNAS to determine which drives achieve the best rips and do all of the error correction properly. The findings showed that a Teac drive was the best. I use this drive with excellent results. See this for more info:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=68223.0

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
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