Anyone Opted for CDR's Rather Than Hard drive --> DAC

When I do my needle drops they get burned to CDR and the 24 bit files get copies onto several hard drives and thumb drives. I want to get a sever, but I keep pushing back that purchase.

 

For me a CD ripped to FLAC with my LG BD-R unit (scratched CD's that are coasters for other units are perfectly readable CD's to it) and dBPoweramp with Accurate Rip and then transfered to an SSD sounds better than the CD read by my Sony X-800 UHD BD/SACD player.
I think reading wise an SSD is less jittery than reading a CD, and error correction is performed during ripping by dBPoweramp and while playing in real time as CD playing does.
Just my 0.02 $.

 

There is a 198 page thread on Stereonet titled Building the Ideal[ish] music server .These guys are extremely dedicated and obsessed and go to extraordinary lengths and expense and yet really struggle,and essentially fail,to get better sound from a dedicated music server than their CD/SACD players.
The bottom line is if you have a good sounding CD player a computer or streamer based alternative will not compete on sound quality.Not even close in my experience.
Or at least not nearly close enough to stop listening to CDs.

 

I burn CD-Rs for important records that I can’t get on the original CD or vinyl simply because my current CD-transport sounds noticeably better than my current streamer.

 

All I have is a Sony X-800 UHD BD/SACD/DVD-A player. I don't need a server, all I want is to play my music files by the Sony X-800 that for music playing is connected via digital coaxial S/PDIF to a Topping D50 D/A converter. I have my favourite and most played CD's ripped to FLAC with dBPoweramp using Accurate Rip, around 60 albums on Hi Res PCM ranging from 44.1 to 192/24, and all my SACD's ripped, their tracks extracted and converted to DSD over PCM files (DoP) with dBPoweramp so I can play my ripped SACD as native DSD.
For me reading digital audio data is far more reliable from an SSD than from a spinning optical disc. I like how my ripped CD's, Hi Res PCM files and DSD files sound played by the Sony X-800 from my two Toshiba SSD's via USB than playing the original discs.
I find a good SSD, the likes of Toshiba, Samsung or Crucial to be extremely reliable. For me my original factory pressed CD's are back up copies with some having nice artwork, and my two Toshiba SSD's being my main playing source.
I like having my music on SSD's, for relliability, the inmediacy of plugging in an USB SSD and have hundreds of albums at just some button clicks and with better sound quality IMHO than the original discs.
Maybe the Sony X-800 has a cheap BD drive that induces tons of jitter 'though I personally doubt it as reading a CD is a piece of cake compared to reading a 3 layer UHD BD disc, or that the Sony X-800 does a great job at reading music data from USB.

 

No, I stopped using CD-R and use a music server.
I also play sacd, bd and sometimes CD but when I want to surf my collection the server is a totally different experience making it easy to hear different masters and albums. I stopped making mix tapes on cdr.

For car I like qobuz streaming

Using a linear power supply with pc and nice DAC sounds good to me. I was was impressed how much better I liked the Mytek Liberty dac vs Oppo 105d.

 

Yes, it is! I'm more inclined to listen to my collection when I can pull up anything I want to hear within seconds.

I stopped twelve years ago. But, I still make compilations. What I do is format the comps to CD length. So, for example, if I wind up with 27 songs, I split them up as volume/disc 1, & volume/disc 2 so they fit the format. I give each "disc" their own folder. I do this for two reasons: a disc length will provide a perfect listening time limit, and if I need to burn a CD-R for someone, the work is already done. All I have to do is load up the files and burn away. I also enjoy the task of creating a 'disc" while keeping within the time constrictions. It's funner than just making a playlist. (Yeah, I know "funner" isn't a word, but kids used it back in my day, and it sounded "funner".)

 

I have tried both.

I use CD for primary listening. I burn Hi-Res to DVD-A which then feeds them over coax to DAC.

It is tempting to take advantage of the convenience of an HDD but CD, like vinyl, represents freedom of ownership with no audit trail of what you listen to or why. Autonomy matters. At least it does to me.

 

?

 

Especially since if you play it backwards it becomes "htepO"

 

CD-Rs were the first thing to go after starting to run out of space. I couldn’t get over them being like blank tapes (which were the first to go when I downsized cassettes), so I made sure I had them ripped as placeholders until I reacquired a non-CD-R version of that album. I can’t justify keeping around CD-Rs (much less making new ones) and having more optical discs than the traditional ones I buy at the shops. Not when my HDD holds it all. I still have blanks for making folks stuff they like (as I refuse to loan stuff out). I certainly enjoyed CD-Rs twenty years ago though!

 

Last year I undertook what will hopefully be my final ripping of CDs to hard drive. On the previous iteration ~15 years ago, I ripped to 320kbps MP3. This time, FLAC. Unfortunately, during that 15 year period, the majority of my CD-Rs became at least partially unreadable. After that experience, I would strongly recommend against using CD-R as a permanent storage medium. Yes, individual hard drives don't last forever either, but it's comparatively trivial to copy the contents of one hard drive to another, so "hard drives" as a storage class are reasonably permanent. Even better if you have a backup with one or more cloud storage services.