Thinking of starting to rip to CD's to FLAC as I start to up my audio equipment. However, I have not seen any discussion about what equipment people use to rip CD's. Can I just get a decent $50 cd reader? or should I aim for something more expensive? at most I'm willing to spend $150 for a CD reader if it truly is worth it.
CD Readers to rip to FLAC?
- Thread starter 14likd1
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obobskivich
Headphoneus Supremus
What do you mean by "CD reader?" You mean the CD drive in your computer? Because it is basically impossible to even spend $50 on that these days - they go for more like $20, and can be regularly had for less if you're patient and can watch sales for a while. At $50 you can buy a Blu-ray burner, which will offer Blu-ray support, but won't be appreciably better or worse for ripping CDs. Easy answer here is you don't need to spend big money or do anything crazy - just grab Exact Audio Copy (its free - http://exactaudiocopy.de/) and rip away assuming your computer has a disc drive in it. If it doesn't, there are loads of cheap options, but we'd need to know more about what kind of computer you have to guide you towards one.
Well, I just thought that since buying the best equipment possible to best the sound quality possible, a good CD ripper would be necessary. I currently plan on ripping to my desktop computer but since it is an ITX, the case doesn't have an optical drive slot. I am currently looking at this CD reader, since I assume that 3.0 means that I can rip the CD faster? also it looks really clean. If USB 3.0 doesn't really matter I was thinking of taking this reader since I really like the mac design where I don't have a CD tray pop up.
obobskivich
Headphoneus Supremus
No, spending more won't really get you anything here but a bigger number on the receipt. It is absolutely not "get the best sound quality possible" - re-read what I previously said: mathematically identical copy of the data. You can't get better than exactly the same thing.
The USB 3.0 thing won't matter at all - yes it is a faster bus, but ultimately speed will be dictated by possible RPMs, and in practice you won't be sustaining whatever they're claiming as peak speeds these days (48X? 52X? 56X? whatever), and even if you were, USB 2.0 is more than fast enough for that. With a laptop-style drive like that, it may be even lower throughout the process, but again, that'll still be pretty fast (even at a measly 4X you can rip a CD in like 15 minutes, and basically nothing these days is that slow). Either a slot load or tray load will be fine - the laptop style tray load will require you to manually pull the tray out most of the way and return it to the drive (desktop drives are motorized), whereas the slot load will automatically "ingest" the disc after you push it in. For a few bucks more, you can get one that does M-Disc support and comes from a more known brand: https://www.amazon.com/LG-AP70NS50-DVDRW-External-SuperMulti/dp/B00L1FLU5C/
If you want a desktop drive (which has a motorized tray and be somewhat faster), you have to spend even more: https://www.amazon.com/LG-GE24NU40-Super-External-Rewriter/dp/B00C4401UO/
If you really like the Apple aesthetic, they still sell the SuperDrive as an external USB box, but it will run around $100 last I knew.
Thanks! I think I might get the LG AP70NS50 but when I was looking for CD readers on the Pioneer site, I saw a showing that CD audio is worse than FLAC? if that is so wouldn't ripping CD to FLAC not yield Hi-Res quality? Or is this graph misleading?
obobskivich
Headphoneus Supremus
Thanks! I think I might get the LG AP70NS50 but when I was looking for CD readers on the Pioneer site, I saw a showing that CD audio is worse than FLAC? if that is so wouldn't ripping CD to FLAC not yield Hi-Res quality? Or is this graph misleading?
"CD is worse than FLAC" makes zero logical sense, so I have no idea what [whoever] is on about. FLAC is a codec that can losslessly store digital audio - it creates a lossless compressed copy of whatever you put into it. So you take 16/44.1 1411kbit CD audio and turn it into 16/44.1 flac that will probably be more like 800kbit (on average) and offers the same data at runtime. FLAC also supports higher bitrates and sample depths, like many digital audio codecs.
There is no "Hi-Res" as a standard - its a marketing brand that some manufacturers pay to use, but its not some sort of standard (like CD Digital Audio or DVD Audio). Broadly I think they want it to mean "higher than CD audio bitrate/sample depth" so for example DVD Audio at 24/96 would be "Hi-Res" but so could a 24/192 flac download or plenty of other things. It is really quite inconsistent compared to something standardized like CD Digital Audio. Point is, you will get 1:1 what is on the CD (assuming it isn't scratched up to the point of being unreadable) with a lossless codec like FLAC, ALAC, WMA-L, etc and fidelity wise that's already past the point of "good enough" and there's never a good reason to "upsample" that (it won't improve fidelity at all, and may introduce noise/errors depending on how its done, what I mean is like if you took in the CD audio (all CDs are 16/44.1) and then had a DAW or whatever "convert" that to 24/88.2 or something, it doesn't magically gain you the extra theoretical dynamic range or frequency response limits, it just makes a bigger file and potentially adds noise if the conversion is done badly). You can read more about "Hi-Res" and CD-quality audio here: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
Just rip your CDs to a lossless format and be happy (and there is no need to favor one over the other beyond whatever your favorite software player or mobile device will be compatible with, so if your gear all supports WMA-L, then use WMA-L, or ALAC, or whatever is compatible - they're all lossless and you can't get any more lossless than that). If space is an issue, high bitrate lossy (like 320k mp3 or WMA) can also be excellent, and in a lot of cases is indistinguishable from the lossless rip. Given how cheap 1TB of storage is these days, there isn't as compelling an argument for that as there once was, but I don't know your specific storage requirements.
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