Ditching my CD's -- ripping / setup help needed

[immemorious]

Hey everyone -- I'd much appreciate some advice for my main audio setup. I listen to a lot of music, but my technical knowledge of audio equipment is relatively limited. My wife and I live in a small apartment, and, after many years, my wife has requested that I find a way to remove the 1800ish CD's from our living room. I am very pleased with the setup I have now (details to follow), and I'm willing to consider the move if I can ensure that I can maintain the high quality of sound I get from my CDs. But I'm in way over my head here, and I need guidance to make sure that I'm not sacrificing sound quality in the transition.

My main computer is a MacBook Pro, which doesn't have enough hard drive space for ripping the CD's in a lossless format, so I'll be using an external hard drive. (I'll be buying a second external hard drive to back up the new networked drive.) For the lossy mp3s I have on my computer, I currently use AirTunes through an Airport Express. Since I don't think that the Airport Express supports a networked hard drive, I think I'd have to upgrade to the Airport Extreme.

My current Airtunes setup does not sound nearly as good relative to CD's played through my Rotel player -- I think this is because I'm using the (super-cheap) DAC in the Airport Express to connect to my Emotiva RSP-1 preamp. (It's a two-channel setup with a Parasound amp.) I'm thinking about buying the Emotiva XDA-1 DAC to connect to the preamp. Are there opportunities for data transmission to go awry from the hard drive connection to the Airport Extreme (which I think will be connected by USB)? What about the optical transmission from the Extreme to the DAC? The current consensus for ripping format seems to be Apple Lossless or FLAC. I'd like to know the opinions here, too.

One last thing: ripping 1800 CD's is going to take a long time. Has anyone used any of those services where you mail the discs out in spindles and they send them back with a hard drive full of the ripped data?

I'm skeptical that the relative cleanliness of CD --> Preamp --> Amp can be matched by iTunes --> Hard Drive (with ripped audio files) --> Airport Extreme --> DAC --> Preamp --> Amp. I'd be happy to be proven otherwise (and my wife will be happier...).

Very much obliged... the information on the web now is so contradictory / confusing, and I'm hoping the discussions on these forums that led me to my current setup will guide me to a good set of decisions here.

best,
evan g.
nyc

 

[bhuskins]

apple lossless may make more sense for you if you're an apple fan with an iphone etc. both formats are great and some services will rip in multiple formats for you. For the cost to rip 1800 discs though you might consider buying one of the 25 disc rip/burners out there for $600 bucks or so and then sell it on ebay when you're done with it. You'll probably get 75% of your money back and you can batch rip up to 25 discs at a time to save you alot of the hassle. i would suggest you try playing your files through different mechanism and see which you prefer. once you have the files a little experimentation might be the best way to settle on a method.

 

[XEagleDriver]

My expereince FWIW

immemorious,

I am in the process you are thinking about, with a couple differences:

Only have about 700-800 CDs. The ripping process is taking a couple months, with a hit-n-miss holiday schedule for ripping discs (probably average about 4-5 per day. One side benefit, is it has been a great way to re-discover much of the music I have collected over the years.

Using MediaMonkeyGold as the ripping/organizing software and FLAC as the format.
There are a couple other well regarded ripping/organizing programs as well.

- One nice feature about MediaMonkey FLAC files, it will convert them very rapidly on the fly to almost any other format--in my case 320 CBR MP3 for use on mobile devices (Sansa Fuze). You could probably do the same to any of the Apple formats.

Decided to use an off-property back-up service in addition to a 2nd on-property HD to protect my investment of time.
In my case the $60/yr Mozy. There are other similar services.

Biggest Lesson Learned is to experiment (especially with mobile devices) and decide on the best metadata format and HD file structure for you before ripping any significant number of discs. I did not find the MM defaults acceptable, but after a couple tries, I now have a "file/metadata system" I really like.

2nd Lesson Learned is ripping a significant number of discs (10+ GB) with out allowing Mozy to archive can lead to a few days of Mozy reporting "unsuccessful" back-ups. They are not really unsuccessful, but rather incomplete and eventually will sync up again.

Cheers,
XEagleDriver

 

[jinjuku]

Hey everyone -- I'd much appreciate some advice for my main audio setup. I listen to a lot of music, but my technical knowledge of audio equipment is relatively limited. My wife and I live in a small apartment, and, after many years, my wife has requested that I find a way to remove the 1800ish CD's from our living room.

Sent you a PM with my shipping address. I cover all costs.

 

[jinjuku]

On a more serious note:

I know the current Airport Express comes with TOSLink (mini TOSLink). This will still let you stream wireless and by-pass the DAC in the A/E.

You can still go to an XDA-1/Dac Magic/Bench Mark 1/ whatever.

I file sitting on a computer and a file sitting on a CD is still just a file. No SQ difference if the file is the same or ripped lossless (FLAC, Apple lossless etc) or ripped full/uncompressed.

As a matter of opinion, I think traditional CDP's are outdated technology like the fax machine. People still find them useful but there are much better ways.

A computer's hard disk tolerances, tracking, read rates etc make a CDP look down right anemic and I believe solve some of the inherent problems of traditional CDP's. Lower jitter to the point of being non-existent for all intents and purposes are one of them.

 

[808htfan]

Just thought I'd mention that if you do the ripping yourself, I think XLD is one of the recommend rippers/converters on Mac. It's free and uses AccurateRip.

XLD
http://tmkk.pv.land.to/xld/index_e.html

tutorial seems down right now
http://jungle.sk/XLD_Tutorial/

http://www.accuraterip.com/

 

[sholling]

I wish I could be more help but I'm not a Mac guy. In the PC world there are some great ways to do it. If I had to do it over again I'd put 4 drives in my tower and let dBPoweramp's batch ripper rip, tag, and file files just the way I like them just as fast as I can feed it discs. But it's Windows only. Do you have a friend with a 2 or 4 CD drive Windows box? The software is only $40 and is the gold standard for ripping and converting between formats.

What I do for playback is I have a networked Western Digital TV Live in both the family room and my bedroom, each with 1.5tb USB drives. After I rip a new CD I copy it across the network to those two rooms - that way I have a backup.

 

[immemorious]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I will post final results when the decisions are made!