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In Reply to: RE: CD Player and Ripper - Ideas Please posted by PAR on March 02, 2017 at 07:21:31
Thanks Pete. Csting our minds back to the early days of transistors, we loved the fact that we could turn on the wireless or a cassette or reel-t-reel machine and enjoy immediate music. Valve sets needed warming up!
That was great during the last few decades of the last century and continued to offer immediate satisfaction with CDs and even DAB radio.
Then along comes the bloody internet and even more bloody mobile phones and we all think they have to be used for everything including our music listening. We invest in router-connected streamers that are controlled by our loathsome phones or a PC. Now we can't just turn a knob and listen to the news or a CD of Beethoven. We have to fart around with multiple devices before we can hear a thing.
My equipment rack is already over-packed with equipment and I want to reduce it but without loosing quality. I prefer a power amp to an integrated, but I'm happy with the preamp handling digital sources as well as analogue (which I now have none of), so it included a DAC - and a streamer module, so I have a single box that included streamer, DAC, analogue and digital preamp - the NAD M12 which I'm very pleased with.
I need to coax my PC into action, load Bluesound or Sonos software and then select radio or music library or streaming service, etc even before I choose radio station or what to listen to. Maybe I'm impatient but we never had this hassle in the "good" old days!
I like to listen to borrowed CDs or those of visiting friends. A Cd player is the obvious choice but it gets infrequent use that certainly doesn't justify a machine as costly and comprehensive as a Mark Levinson 390S CD player - and I don't want the thing cluttering up my rack. My NAS is playing up so the obvious solution is a new ripper / player / music store. I've found the NAD 50.2 does this but an awful lot more that I don't want. However it matches my NAD preamp so is an obvious choice. However as real time CD listening is an occasional occupation as is ripping, I'd be happy with another make of kit if it saved me a grand or two! Nothing yet has come up apart from the all-in-one Naim you found costing nearly as much, but probably not as good as the NAD. What else is there? I appreciate your concern regarding the CD drive's ability to plays in real time, but that should not be the case with a product with a £3800 price tag - but worth checking out! The RAID is valuable to me despite the article your provided from a photographer. I earned my living as a photographer but gave it up just in time to avoid the switch to digital by professionals. The gist of his article is that you need an independent backup AS WELL AS a RAID offering 2 identical copies of your images / music as soon as you save / rip it. Backup externally every month or however often you feel happy with, but RAID will save some of your bacon if a drive happens to fail between backups.
I do have a Teac CD player, but even using its digital output, it's not up to the quality I'm used to - and it's a box I don't want. So the search continues - or I just cough up and get an M50.2! Happy days. Peter
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