CD sounds distorted, but a copy made from FLACs does not.

Try posting six more times.

 

You need 50 posts before you'll be able to see the classifieds section. You're almost there.

 

Racking up my post count!

 

An obnoxious double post to rack up posts!

 

ripping CDs is a pain, but don't put it off man. Even to do it properly only takes a few clicks and isn't an actively involving process. Even if you only do one a day, that's one less that you have to do the next day, and it's done for life. 1000 CDs will easily fit on a 1tb drive, perhaps even a 500gb drive.

spending a lot of money on a CD player in this day and age is kind of a waste, but that's just my opinion.

 

Nothing better than having ALL of you music at your disposal instantly.

 

Rip them and back them up. It's worth the effort in my experience. I listen to CD sourced files more than the actual CDs for the convenience and it saves wearing and tearing of the physical disks. My dedicated computer for this is a Mac mini And my CD player is a Rega Apollo R both feed a Rega DAC R. If I had to chose one I would pick the Mac. I run the Mini headless and control it with a iPad and MacBook Pro.

 

Actually popping in the CD is faster than booting up the android box, opening Kodi, then finding the file I want.

 

My Mac mini is on all the time as it also provides the network with music files.

 

A bit on a different note, but is there really a noticeable difference between 24-bit and 16-bit files? Like, if a 16-bit track is playing and the next one is 24-bit, do you notice an increase in quality right away, or is it something more subtle you have to really listen for? I can usually tell an Mp3 when I hear it if listening conditions are ideal, especially for certain genres (I've found metal songs don't compress well). M4a/AAC is closer to CD quality to my ears, but I try to avoid lossy as much as possible. But if I can tell generally an Mp3 from CD quality flac, think I'd hear a benefit from 24-bit?

 

The improvement that 24 bit provides is not always subtle, I hear it most in percussion, snare and cymbal hits. But often there is no discernible difference between CD (16/44.1) and "high resolution" audio tracks. If you search the entire forum you will find thousands of words on this subject. Ultimately the conclusion most have reached is the skill of the engineer who miked and mastered the recording is more important than the bitrate on any given file. Also there is a point of diminishing returns; I can't hear the difference between 24/96 and 24/192. So, don't get too hung up on the numbers, some early relatively low bitrate digital recordings sound great (Donald Fagen "Night Fly" 16 bit 50Khz) but its the musicians and the engineers who are making the magic. The media format is just the packaging, and yes some packaging does a better job of delivering the "goods" than others but its still what's inside that matters. In other words I would rather have a first class recording on CD than a poorly recorded and mastered one on 24/192.

 

Yeah, mastering is absolutely the #1 priority. I love using dynamic range database to try and find the best release of an album. That's why it's nice to have both digital files, CDs, and vinyl as playback sources to give more flexibility in which version of an album I can pick up.

This forum has also been really helpful finding out that stuff too, like which Nirvana issues to pick up on vinyl.