I rip all my discs because I load music on my iPod/iPhone/iPad, and until recently used to stream music from my computer to an AppleTV puck.
The Cambridge Audio DacMagic is great for playing all of that in my living room speakers and headphones. It did start to seem overkill to have a Wolfson-powered external DAC, plus a Wolfson-powered Blu Ray player dedicated for only playing CDs.
I also have a Cambridge Audio DacMagic with an available optical input port, so your solution would work fine for me. Thanks! 👍
This will be my likely future option. The suggestions people have posted here have incredible reviews/testimonials… with even more incredible prices! 😂
As for my Pioneer, many on this sub are familiar with Pioneer Blu Ray players having persistent firmware issues. One weird hack I’ve discovered that resets the error issue for a while is: try playing a professionally produced audio CD, preferably from an older redbook standard like from the 80s. It seems to reset the firmware to a state where it will function fine without issue. I just tried it last night after having issues playing the Blu Ray for REM’s “Monster” reissue. Fingers crossed!
The one I use for watching movies is an entry level Sony. It’s perfectly good for movies. But I did a comparison using some regular audio CDs and the Pioneer unit and the latter had a more expansive sound with much better bottom end. I’ve never been a fan of Sony audio signature, so my experience wasn’t entirely surprising.
AIFF will let you keep metadata and is equal in quality to WAV