CD - a dated format???

[daveh75]

‘You don’t need quality kit’ - interesting statement for a Hi Fi forum. Makes me want to sell my stuff and replace it with an old iPad and some cheap active speakers 😉

Bit perfect audio is trivial - the whole "you need a resolving enough system/quality kit to hear a difference" thing is just toss audiophiles spout to justify their beliefs...

 

[Dom]

Resolving sounds like something you add to water to make it a different colour.

It's not like a cable is going to make a big difference anyway.

 

[podknocker]

‘You don’t need quality kit’ - interesting statement for a Hi Fi forum. Makes me want to sell my stuff and replace it with an old iPad and some cheap active speakers 😉

You don't need the kit you are talking about to rip CDs and store the files. You really don't need anything exotic at all. You seem to be one of those people obsessed with expensive technology, just because it's expensive. I've worked in IT for decades and I know spending a fortune on the latest blingy nonsense is a complete waste of money. So many on this forum are under the delusion that everything must be the highest spec and unless it's expensive, it won't do the job. Complete nonsense. I spent £5 on a CAT 6 LAN cable and it does the job, because it meets the standard defined by the industry. There are many on this forum spending hundreds on LAN cables and they are simply gullible people with deep pockets. You said:

'CD rips can sound as good as or better than CDs. They can also sound as good as or better than vinyl. From personal experience, the only way to achieve this is to buy some real quality kit and then support it with real quality network infrastructure.'

What do you define as 'real quality kit' and 'real quality network infrastructure' and why do you need it to rip CDs?

Are you suggesting we should all have 48 port gigabit switches in our living rooms, to rip CDs to FLAC?

 

[Dom]

Perfection is a word, dreamed up by rich elitist to frustrate.

Take a minute and put your feet up, relax a while.

 

[Pedro2]

You don't need the kit you are talking about to rip CDs and store the files. You really don't need anything exotic at all. You seem to be one of those people obsessed with expensive technology, just because it's expensive. I've worked in IT for decades and I know spending a fortune on the latest blingy nonsense is a complete waste of money. So many on this forum are under the delusion that everything must be the highest spec and unless it's expensive, it won't do the job. Complete nonsense. I spent £5 on a CAT 6 LAN cable and it does the job, because it meets the standard defined by the industry. There are many on this forum spending hundreds on LAN cables and they are simply gullible people with deep pockets. You said:

'CD rips can sound as good as or better than CDs. They can also sound as good as or better than vinyl. From personal experience, the only way to achieve this is to buy some real quality kit and then support it with real quality network infrastructure.'

What do you define as 'real quality kit' and 'real quality network infrastructure' and why do you need it to rip CDs?

Are you suggesting we should all have 48 port gigabit switches in our living rooms, to rip CDs to FLAC?

The word that I used was ‘quality’ and not ‘expensive’. Sometimes the two overlap, but not always. I agree that ripping CDs does not require anything special but playing them back takes a little more thought. I use quality CAT5e cable (Belden Catsnake), a fairly cheap Synology NAS and a far from expensive D-link switch. We could spend hours discussing whether or not Cat8 affects sound quality more or less than Cat6 but life’s too short. I read forums like this, watched reviews on YouTube, spent a bit of money , listened carefully, and then made up my own mind.

I never gave network kit a thought until recently and then discovered that, to my ears, it can affect sound quality. What I have concluded over my years on the HiFi journey, is that different kit sounds different, cables can affect sound and that your listening room is part of the chain. Oh, and CDs as well as CD rips can sound great.