Ripping CD's to Flac, does the transport make a diffenerence?

PlasmaNewbie

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I am thinking about ripping my CD's and I was digging around on the forum and found the above post...

My primary source of choice is Vinyl, I then also have a lot of cd's that are not available on Vinyl ...

I've got a handful of albums that are flacs which I purchased from Bandcamp/Burning Shed , that I am very happy with.

My question is, if I am going to rip some of my CD's, does the transport make a difference ?

The DVD drive in my PC must have cost a few pounds to make/buy. If I was to RIP them using my PC, would the resultant flac files be any different if I had used the Melco D100 (which is over £1k) instead of the internal drive?

Its not an experiment I am going to splash out on to try. Has anyone actually tried any (file) comparisons on ripping using different transports (but using the same software)?
 
You can test this for yourself as you have all of the necessary hardware and software. Once you have ripped the CDs test the files with this
to see if there is any difference
 
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Good ripping software should be able to extract a bit-perfect copy from a cheap computer CD drive because it has one enormous advantage over a CD player - if it detects an error, it can retry as many times as it wants.

Ripping software doesn't have to send out a stream of bits in real time, so it doesn't matter how long it takes. Even if the drive is so poor it only reads correctly 50% of the time, the software can just read it all twice on average.

I've even had CDs that were unplayable on my Audiolab 8000CD player because they'd deteriorated and presumably produced a higher error rate than the real-time CD protocol can handle. But I read them successfully on my computer and its cheap drive - it just took several times longer than it would take to play them.
 
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You can test this for yourself as you have all of the necessary hardware and software.
Thanks for the tip on diffmaker. I only have the internal drive on my PC. I wasn't actually going to spend £1k on the Melco, that's money best spent on vinyl! I just wondered if it made a difference.
 
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That's the beauty of digital. You can copy it millions of times with no loss in quality. As long as you can deliver the file to the DAC it will be exactly the same as the data on the CD.
 
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Depending on the software used to rip from CD you might find it supports a service called accuraterip. This a a database of checksums for each track of an album, if multiple other users have tipped the same track and got the same checksum you can be confident your own rip is accurate.
 
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I use this:-​

ASUS SDRW-08D2S-U LITE Black - Portable 8X DVD Burner with M-DISC Support for Lifetime Data.​


Every test I use comes back bit perfect e.g. dbPoweramp verify.
 
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I am thinking about ripping my CD's and I was digging around on the forum and found the above post...

My primary source of choice is Vinyl, I then also have a lot of cd's that are not available on Vinyl ...

I've got a handful of albums that are flacs which I purchased from Bandcamp/Burning Shed , that I am very happy with.

My question is, if I am going to rip some of my CD's, does the transport make a difference ?

The DVD drive in my PC must have cost a few pounds to make/buy. If I was to RIP them using my PC, would the resultant flac files be any different if I had used the Melco D100 (which is over £1k) instead of the internal drive?

Its not an experiment I am going to splash out on to try. Has anyone actually tried any (file) comparisons on ripping using different transports (but using the same software)?
The CD drive is less critical if ripping than if simply playing a CD in real time. Generally speaking, avoid stand-alone computers but if you use good ripping software and CD checker software, with a mediocre drive you should get a bit perfect result in FLAC or WAV. The software will identify the disc, will look up that CD on 2 or 3 databases to extablish the precise bit count that should be extracted from the disc, and will try, try and try again until it gets that precise but count. If it still fails, it should report an imprefect rip, probably identifying which tracks are defective.

My first ripper was an excellent RipNAS, a combined ripper and NAS drive configured with the best software available at the time and it rarely reporrted a less-than-perfect rip. If DIY'ing choose software carefully or buy a bespoke ripper / store, such as RipNAS or Bluesound Vault (pleny of used ones around). After the RipNAS, I bought the NAD M50.2 that combines, CD player, CD ripper, streamer and music store. There are very few hi-fi devices on the market that will both play and rip a CD. Quite costly but it does its jobs supremely. Peter
 
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Thanks for all of the responses! So basically for ripping the £12 PC transport I already have will produce the same results as a £1000 transport such as the Melco D100, when paired with something like dBPoweramp !

Pretty much what I had thought, but always good to check!
 
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There should be a 'I dodged the snake oil' emoji :D
 
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Thanks for all of the responses! So basically for ripping the £12 PC transport I already have will produce the same results as a £1000 transport such as the Melco D100, when paired with something like dBPoweramp !

Pretty much what I had thought, but always good to check!
Pretty much, though even the best software may not retrieve the full bit count if the transport is total rubbish! If buying or building a CD ripper with storage, best to install a good transport as they are still not costly and you'll appreciate the reliability of the drawer mechanism as well as the reader. The former is often the reason for scrapping these things!
 
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