dvd drive vs hard drive for play back

[music_man]

i would like to just play cd's in my computers dvd drive. my meridian 808v6 uses a computer dvd drive as the transport if that say anything. however i am wondering if it sounds better to rip them to the hard drive with no compression and play them from memory? Even though meridian uses one i am not sure how accurate dvd drives are. i have a good one made for audio though. it is just impracticable to rip the amount of cd's i have.
 
your opinions please. 

 

[Mython]

  .... it is just impracticable to rip the amount of cd's i have.

 
 
I would respectfully contend that it depends more on your frame of mind than the number of CDs you have  (assuming you can afford a large enough hard drive, but they're very good value these days)
 
 
Around 6 months ago, I bought a couple of 2TB portable USB 3.0 hard drives, and ripped all my CDs to .flac.
 
It was a very laborious task, but I attacked the task head-on and ripped around 30-40 CDs per day., for a few weeks.
 
I was so determined because my CDs had been sitting in storage for years, barely being played, and I wanted to have instant random-access to any album I spontaneously desire, without having to hunt for it.
 
I can now say that the effort was worth it. On more occasions than I can count, I have been grateful that it's all there; every single album, single, EP, in my collection, on a tiny drive the size of a deck of cards.
 
 
 
With all that said, one way to make the task less daunting would be to simply chip away at it, ripping each album whenever you feel like listening to it, so that you gradually end up with your library ripped to hard drive. I would strongly caution that no one (in my opinion) should ever undertake such a task unless they have 2 hard drives, in order to mirror the data, so that a back-up exists, in the unfortunate event that one drive fails at some point in the future.
 
 
 
 
 
As for whether ripped music data being read from a hard drive might sound any different from the same music data being read from an optical disc, that's an interesting question to ponder.
 
Things that might influence this could include:
 

1. How large the optical drives internal cache/buffer is

 

1. How large the optical drives cache/buffer is configured in the computer software to which the drive is connected

 

1. How fast the internal firmware of the optical drive tends to spin Redbook audio CDs

 

1. The condition of the CD being played (how many scratches, fingerprints, any warping, deterioration of the 'silvering', etc.)

 

1. How well error-correction has been implemented in the optical drives firmware (it is quite amazing how much this can vary - the old Plextor drives were awesome)

 

1. How well the laser assembly of the optical drive has been designed and manufactured (tends to generate fewer read errors with non-perfect CDs)

 

1. How accurately a music file has been ripped from a CD to hard drive (software like ExactAudioCopy does a much better job than most other ripping softwares)

 

1. How much physical/ambient and electric noise your hard drive generates (some computer audiophiles prefer to use SSD drives, to absolutely minimise physical/ambient and electrical noise generated by their storage drive).

 

1. ...and many more influencial factors

 
 
Remember that (broadly-speaking), when playing an optical disc, any error correction needs to be undertaken on-the-fly, whereas a ripped file has already had its error-correction done, when it was ripped.
 
 
 
 
In any event, I stand by my earlier suggestion - ripping CDs is a laborious task, but it's so worthwhile, in the longrun, so I urge you to do it, whether your approach is to bite-the-bullet and tackle your entire library head-on, or just do it bit-by-bit, over a period of months.
 
 
 
Approximately how many CDs do you have in your library?

 

[music_man]

well this is the problem. i have 50,000 plus cd's! not kidding. i was a recording engineer for 45 years. so everyday i received about 10 demos/promos. the ones that say not for resale. so you can see the problem. of course to be honest i really only care for about a mere 300 of them. so that should not be an issue i guess. i would certainly love to have it all indexed in jriver and control with my phone. i saw this in action recently and it is vastly superior. i have read it is even better to play from memory. on that note i have two tb of ssd and 15 tb of scisi over sata. so i am covered there,
 
i just find it odd that the meridian 808v6 uses a computer dvd drive. they must think it is a superior transport since that is a flagship player. i am not sure if it actually dumps it into memory because it takes a long time to read a cd's toc.
 
i do agree to rip. just tedious as you agree.  i can do so much more with it though. i will not rip with any compression. not even flac luckily i have the space.
 
i just wonder how the dvd rom is. if it is at all suspect i figure it could not make a mirror image rip either. it is a good asus that brags about audio quality on the box so perhaps it is okay.
 
on a side note he sony scd-1, imo puts any other cd transport to shame and it does not use a dvd rom. it has the philips swing arm mechanism.  it is  also over twenty hears old. they don't build 'em like they used to. still, meridian must have some reason to use the dvd rom.
 
ripping is certainly the right answer though. i can then play from memory and i do not see a more perfect file than that. assuming the dvd  rom ripped it correctly.
 
thank you for replying.

 

[Mython]

50,000... wow!
 
That certainly trumps my approx 1,000 discs!
 
I now comprehend the magnitude of your problem

 

[obobskivich]

I'm not intimately familiar with the Meridian itself, but there is a "genre" of hardware CD players that use computer ROM drives as their transport - they are generally reading the disc and buffering it into memory, to perform more error correction or DSP or whatever it is the manufacturer intends to do (since they can read at faster than 1x in this mode they can be "ahead" of wherever the program material is - e.g. they're faster than real time; Parasound's transport, for example, reads at 4x - http://parasound.com/pdfs/CD1Whitepaper.pdf). I think Technics was the first to do this, back in the late 1980s, but Parasound and Technics certainly aren't the only ones. Basically they're attempting to mitigate read errors by being able to pass over a potentially bad sector multiple times and/or having more time to do whatever error correction due to reading at >1x and outputting from a buffer. Your computer isn't going to do quite the same thing - depending on how old/new it is you're either getting the drive's internal DAC (or S/PDIF digital) output straight into your soundcard, or the operating system is grabbing the digital audio right off the data bus. Generally in both cases this is at 1x speed for CDs and DVDs, and there's no voodoo buffer in the way. If you're pulling the analog audio from the drive's internal DA that usually isn't "high fidelity" but if you're taking the digital audio (especially via the data bus) as long as the CD isn't beat to heck it should be invariant to what EAC outputs, but if the disc is beat to heck EAC may have a better chance since it can perform error correction as it rips (and there's no onus for it to keep up with real time or anything else). A lot of stand-alone players are equally doomed if the disc is beat to heck though - they'll either skip around, stop playing, or (if they're smart/fancy) take small progressive steps away from the damage in an attempt to resume at an undamaged block (and then there's the "dark side" of hardware error correction where the transport may grind the pick-up head into the disc surface as it attempts to re-focus on a bad sector). Playing back from disk is theoretically identical from playback to playback as you're just reading a file that shouldn't be changing from read to read, and your computer's hard-drive (especially if it is solid-state) will be more resistant to vibration/shock than a CD player (so no skpping), plus you don't have to worry about the disc getting damaged, lost, etc in handling.

For "I want to listen to music" I'd probably go with ripped over real-time, because I don't like having my optical drive(s) tied up just to listen to a single CD. Easy answer there is to just move through your collection as you come to things - you find a disc you want to listen to, you rip it then, and on you go with your day. If your computer is reasonably fast it shouldn't be too bad and it will get things ripped as you come to them (and if you're never listening to some random CD that you don't know you have, oh well I guess).

WRT ripping, I'd use EAC because of the aforementioned error correction, and because its very simple/straight forward to use (it isn't playback software or a media organizer, its JUST a CD ripper - use whatever you want for playback later). As far as encoding, flac is not compression - its lossless (bottom line it is mathematically identical to the original bitstream - that's why its lossless). Flac is the most transportable, but WMA-L and ALAC are still good choices, and if you're just working from a desktop PC (or PCs) any of them are equally interchangeable (WMA-L and ALAC both looked like they were going to "take off" for mobile devices until flac came along, but now it seems that flac is the most prevalent supported). Also, you don't have (anywhere near) enough space to do "raw" rips of 50,000 CDs (e.g. as iso images) - that would be around 35,000,000 MB (around 35TB - that's of actual data, and 35TB of isos would be a MESS to organize (it'd be no better than what you have now, you'd just kill a ton of hard-drives and months of your time to get there)). Even using lossless compression like flac or WMA-L you will not be able to accommodate 50,000 CDs with the storage you have - you will need probably *at minimum* 30TB (after formatting) of storage to accommodate 50,000 CDs in lossless. I'd personally go RAID6 with a proper hardware controller personally. If you went with high bit-rate (or more ideally, high variable bit-rate) compression you could potentially squeeze your collection into 15TB. Generally most people can't discriminate between high bitrate lossy compression and lossless compression, but due to how cheap storage is (in context), it is usually suggested to just go lossless these days. Given the massive size of your collection, lossless may be unfeasible from a logistical perspective, as you're basically talking about a fairly expensive (five figures) server just to hold everything. No matter how you go about ripping it, I'd highly suggest going with some sort of encoded container format that supports meta data (e.g. flac, mp3, ALAC, whatever) so that you can index the entire collection (which makes it searchable and therefore more accessible - basically think about it like a library: whats easier to browse through, a nicely organized digital catalog (like Google) or a huge unsorted pile of books?). If you're just going after your top 300 discs this is a significantly more manageable situation, but I'd still just go with flac, WMA-L, or ALAC, and be done with it.

As far as timeline goes, if you did 30-40 discs a day, you could accomplish this in probably around 4-5 years. If you have a decent computer with multiple optical drives you could probably accomplish more than that in a day, but my suspicion is that you don't want this to be your full-time job for the next year or two. I'd say just rip what you actually listen to, and recycle the rest (or donate it to a library or music/broadcast/etc school or something).

 

[PleasantSounds]

Great advice, just one correction: since a typical CD ripped to FLAC takes about 300 MB of disk space, a 50,000 CD collection would take about 15 TB.
 
I have also transferred my CD collection to the computer and I'm not looking back. The benefits I notice would include:
- having everything searchable and instantly available throughout the house.
- ability to create custom playlists on the spot, across as many CDs as I want (great for parties)
- lots of space regained with CDs boxed in storage
- no concerns about condition of the media
 
If you decide to start ripping your collection, I'd recommend to start with the frequently played subset and then stop or slow down for a while. Over time you will get some idea whether your collection is organized to your satisfaction, and changes on a large collection could be quite painful.

 

[obobskivich]

Great advice, just one correction: since a typical CD ripped to FLAC takes about 300 MB of disk space, a 50,000 CD collection would take about 15 TB.

It depends on the content since its a variable bitrate encode, but the 35TB figure is for ripping iso images of 50,000 CDs, not flac. Flac/WMA-L/ALAC *may* be able to squeak into 15TB, but I'd be more comfortable with more storage if the goal is 50,000 discs lossless, even with a lossless compression scheme. Using a random sample of lossless albums I've got, none are under 300MB, but 400MB would probably be a safe generalized estimate (better to have unused storage than run out of space, and remember this is actual data, not pre-format size).

 

[Joel Peterson]

Does anyone know if modern SATA CD/DVD drives have top knotch error correction in comparison to older drives? The average cost for a modern CD/DVD drive nowadays is ~$15.

 

[obobskivich]

Does anyone know if modern SATA CD/DVD drives have top knotch error correction in comparison to older drives? The average cost for a modern CD/DVD drive nowadays is ~$15.

For real-time playback I haven't noticed any differences between my newer SATA drives and older PATA drives, but in terms of other characteristics (e.g. noise, max read speed, etc) newer drives are really an example of getting what you pay for - there's a reason they cost $15-20.

 

[Roseval]

   i have read it is even better to play from memory. on that note i have two tb of ssd and 15 tb of scisi over sata. so i am covered there
 

 
Ripping is reading a CD and store the audio in a file on a HD.
Memory playback is something different.
This is about reading an entire track, decode it and store it in memory before playback starts.
Some claim this yields an audible benefit.
 
Ripping
By design bit perfect reading of a CD is not guaranteed.
In practice a CD in good condition will be read bit perfect but you cannot be sure.
I suggest using a ripper supporting AcurateRip.
This verifies the rip against an internet database with rips made by others.
It is a nice extra lock on the door.
My personal preference is dBpoweramp.
Of course, it supports AccurateRip, in fact, they invented it and it has excellent meta data.
 
File format
WAV is uncompressed PCM
Support for this format as far as the audio part is concerned is almost universal.
Unfortunately tagging is a mess. This is partly due to deficiencies in the WAV tagging standard, partly due to bad or lacking implementation in many players.
If you stick to e.g. dBpoweramp + JRiver you will not have this problem as they booth use the same non-standard convention by writing ID3 style tags in a info chunck.
The moment you start using other software e.g. DLNA you might hit problems.
I advise to use FLAC.
Lossless
Excellent tagging
Checksum (you can verify possible corruption)
Wide support
 
50.000
There are ripping robots 

 

[music_man]

I just intend to rip like my top 300/500. there are hundreds i do not listen to. some i never listened to. as i said since i was an engineer i was getting 5-10 promos a day for 40+ years. i would never have purchased hundreds i did not listen to. i guess if i do not wish to rip i can read at dvd speed 8x into system memory. i have plenty. this is a high end audio server. dual xeons underclocked and completely fanless.the platter drives are raid6. the ssd's are striped.everything is scsi over sata. however 1 ssd is pci-e. i would not use that one for music as it does not require the speed and would be a waste.
 
i really appreciate all this info. i was not aware of some of this stuff.

 

[obobskivich]

I just intend to rip like my top 300/500. there are hundreds i do not listen to. some i never listened to. as i said since i was an engineer i was getting 5-10 promos a day for 40+ years. i would never have purchased hundreds i did not listen to. i guess if i do not wish to rip i can read at dvd speed 8x into system memory. i have plenty. this is a high end audio server. dual xeons underclocked and completely fanless.the platter drives are raid6. the ssd's are striped.everything is scsi over sata. however 1 ssd is pci-e. i would not use that one for music as it does not require the speed and would be a waste.

i really appreciate all this info. i was not aware of some of this stuff.

Just a note: it won't read a CD at DVD 8x (11MB/s); it'll read it at CD Nx (where N is whatever the media and drive can realistically sustain - nothing will hit that peak 8x or 16x or 52x or whatever as a continuous read and instead you'll see it "ramp up" as it moves to the outside of the disc because its running CAV). Getting more into it: there's a huge difference between DVD speed grading and CD speed grading - CD 1x is based on audio CD read-speed (which is constant linear velocity (CLV)) - 150 KB/s and the drive slows down as the head moves outward (from 500 RPMs to 200 RPMs). When reading as a data disc (or ripping an audio CD) modern ROM drives will run constant angular velocity (CAV) and therefore maintain a constant (and usually fairly high) RPM - as the head moves outward the transfer rate thus increases (and that's where you get nice big marketing #s - CAV 20x is similar to CLV 8x on the low-side, but because it maintains 4000 RPM throughout on the high-side its faster). Kenwood made things interesting with their 72x drive, which uses multiple pickups and runs at lower RPMs to achieve high throughput (from what I understand it is a CLV drive - they're kind of rare).

DVD 1x, by contrast, is 1.39 MB/s, and DVD operates (as far as I know) generally in a CLV fashion (there are some proprietary things that use CAV, like Xbox). The formats operate on different wavelengths too, but that's a separate discussion. The bigger point I'm making is that you won't be ripping the CD in 59 seconds, but probably more like 120-180 seconds, depending on your drive/computer/etc (and if the disc is craptastic or not - if a lot of these are self-made/home-made/etc demos/singles written with a smattering of CD-R drives and stand-alone CD recorders over the years on whatever media "they" had available, I wouldn't be surprised if you've got a crate of ~50,000 coasters punctuated with a few playable discs here and there; not trying to be the grim reaper but ancient, cheap CD-R media written by ancient burners usually does not age well).

Some more to read (probably more than you ever wanted to know):
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9808/980823kenwood40x.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM#Transfer_rates

 

[music_man]

thanks. these are all commercial glass master cd's. they just threw them to every one who got on some list. i was a lead engineer so i suppose that is how i got on. my understanding is the meridian reads at 8x into memory and that plays at 1x from memory. using no oversampling. they feel this is more accurate error correction i gather. it is funnt that there is a $25 drive in that machine. i am guessing if you play audio in real time on a pc it reads at1x. although there may be software that operates it at higher speed. not sure. i imagine ripping in wav to an ssd or ram is going to be the highest performance as there is nothing mechanical involved. thee was when it was ripping it though. perhaps the meridian is better than the pc. have no idea about that either. i have other high end cd transports but they read at 1x and use oversampling.  in that regard the meridian may be unique. there was also swing arm and ocher technologies tried of course.

 

[obobskivich]

thanks. these are all commercial glass master cd's. they just threw them to every one who got on some list. i was a lead engineer so i suppose that is how i got on. my understanding is the meridian reads at 8x into memory and that plays at 1x from memory. using no oversampling. they feel this is more accurate error correction i gather. it is funnt that there is a $25 drive in that machine. i am guessing if you play audio in real time on a pc it reads at1x. although there may be software that operates it at higher speed. not sure. i imagine ripping in wav to an ssd or ram is going to be the highest performance as there is nothing mechanical involved. thee was when it was ripping it though. perhaps the meridian is better than the pc. have no idea about that either. i have other high end cd transports but they read at 1x and use oversampling.  in that regard the meridian may be unique. there was also swing arm and ocher technologies tried of course.

Generally when a PC is playing back CD audio its working at 1x CLV (and on a lot of newer drives they specifically tout this feature, because it usually means the drive is in its quietest operating state (lowest RPMs)), whereas ripping will be done at a higher RPM CAV mode in order to save time (because, much like Verruca Salt, we want it NOW!).

The Meridian is probably semi-unique in how its working, like the Parasound CD transport from a few years ago, or the Technics reference transport/player, where it reads the disc out faster into memory and therefore has a better chance to do error correction (because its given itself more time), but whether or not that solution ends up being actually "better" probably highly depends on how good said error correction actually works, and how much its needed (e.g. if you have a pristine disc that was nicely pressed, the transport/player/etc really doesn't have to do much to not screw it up - if you're trying to play back something that was used as a hockey puck that's another story entirely).

The oversampling and whatnot are done in the DAC, which is separate from the reading of the disc (and afaik there should be zero difference wrt error correction for the actual read-out of the disc at this stage, since that's all in the transport section, and at this point you've either got a working digital bitstream or you don't) - if the Meridian is fairly old it isn't surprising that it uses a multibit R2R ladder DAC (because back in the 1980s into the early 1990s that was generally SOTA, prior to the advent of functional multi-bit delta-sigma DACs in the late 1990s; its coming back around these days too), so it has no need to oversample to provide 16-bits of precision (as opposed to delta-sigma that relies on oversampling and decimation to function properly).

 

[music_man]

thank you. the pc does spinn the disc at 52x when writing into memory. so i just play from memory. that should be fine. it is meridians latest transport no dac inside. i figure it is doing exactly the same thing as the pc. it is stupid what that costs when a pc can do the same thing. if it is better or not i don't know. i do know i have better sounding shiny disc transports anyways. those happen to play at 1x. i figure in ram is best though. especially now that we have large ssd's. i rip to wav.