All my CDs are ripped to FLAC and shared on a hard drive on my network. If I get a new CD, I rip it immediately and add it to the library.
But if I have a guest who brings CDs to listen to on my system I don't want to rip them to my library. I need a CD player.
The quality of the CD player's DAC - or even if it has one - is irrelevant. I am going to use a digital output to my DAC. So what matters is reading the bits correctly. And I really don't want to be able to hear the disk spinning, I want a quiet drive mechanism.
I have read plenty about how tough it is to read a CD, and worse for a DVD, worse still for a BluRay disk. High end CD players go to great lengths to deal with vibrations and such. Meanwhile, for not much more than $300 you can buy a superb drive that plays Blu-ray disks as well as DVDs and CDs. And you can get units that work for much less. The LG drive in my tower PC rips CDs at as much as 30X normal speed with few problems; it cost less than $50.
IMHO, getting the bits right is not such a difficult engineering challenge today.
Then I read in the audio magazines of players costing from huge to astronomical prices... and all they have to do is gets the bits right.
Can anyone suggest a CD player, or transport, with digital outputs, that (a) gets the bits right, and (b) is very quiet?
Thanks!
RH in CT
All my CDs are ripped to FLAC and shared on a hard drive on my network. If I get a new CD, I rip it immediately and add it to the library.
But if I have a guest who brings CDs to listen to on my system I don't want to rip them to my library. I need a CD player.
The quality of the CD player's DAC - or even if it has one - is irrelevant. I am going to use a digital output to my DAC. So what matters is reading the bits correctly. And I really don't want to be able to hear the disk spinning, I want a quiet drive mechanism.
I have read plenty about how tough it is to read a CD, and worse for a DVD, worse still for a BluRay disk. High end CD players go to great lengths to deal with vibrations and such. Meanwhile, for not much more than $300 you can buy a superb drive that plays Blu-ray disks as well as DVDs and CDs. And you can get units that work for much less. The LG drive in my tower PC rips CDs at as much as 30X normal speed with few problems; it cost less than $50.
IMHO, getting the bits right is not such a difficult engineering challenge today.
Then I read in the audio magazines of players costing from huge to astronomical prices... and all they have to do is gets the bits right.
Can anyone suggest a CD player, or transport, with digital outputs, that (a) gets the bits right, and (b) is very quiet?
Thanks!
RH in CT