If I remember correctly Melco was mentioned and things got a bit ‘warm’. What are you using for your ripping ?
G - Zen 1 & 3. I really don’t want the above to come across as a complete dis’ of the product. Had I not experienced this ripping issue I’d be well impressed with all its capability especially at its price point. Hopefully the bods there will be to enlighten me and I’ll pass it on.
There were discussions when Melco introduced their CD drive, search “Melco rips” and you should find them.
My experience, when I bought my N1a it was being demonstrated with an unbranded external drive and I was told to buy any one for £20. When the third one failed (my local IT repair shop said design life is 500 to 700 cycles), I bought the Buffalo blu-ray drive, the Melco was beyond my means. Out of interest, I renamed some rips and then used the same CDs to create new ones. There was a small difference, clarity, timing. Also noticeable was that ripping seemed to be faster. With the cheap drives there was the odd CD where the drive rattled and vibrated, out of balance? That does not happen with the Buffalo.
I don’t know the N1zH, if you cann rip direct to that from an external drive, what happens?
Thanks Cats’. That mirrors my experiences. Also, the ripping on the new machine is much faster than previous. There’s a slow mode but this doesn’t affect anything other than chassis noise in the room. What I would like to do is compare a rip from a D100 plugged into the Melco. Very expensive for a CD ripper, though.
Hi Eagle,
Here are some questions on your ripping proces:
At what speed are you ripping? What rippingsoftware do you use?
What brand cd ripper do you use?
Al of these thing matter in terms of sound quality.
I’ve ripped cd’s (and burnt) over two decades using different soft and hardware.
The best results I got with a Plector ripper on the lowest ripping speed using Plextor software.
Eac software is also ok for ripping. By this types software you can actualy ‘calibrate’ your cd rip device and lots of other accurad rip settings.
Comparing these rips to a Innuos zen mini I have around the Plex rip sounds a lot better. The Innuos is ok but a bit more compressed and slightly less dynamic.
I wonder how they stand out to a Core, haven’t compared it yet.
Regards
Gerben
I have never read someone here that the D100 rips are no better vs Dbpoweramp or other cheap drives. All found a nice improvement, be it Darkbear, Dunc, …
Some bought the D100 , ripped, and sold it.
Hi Gerben - thank you, this is hugely helpful. Your Mini experience matches mine. Which model Plextor? And thanks frenchrooster - are you saying, simply, some find D100 superior and some don’t?
Meantime, I’m wary of posting much more until I hear from the manufacturers, given the reference above to the plethora of content on this topic already.
@Eagle3333 I have the Melco D100 with a DC3 linear P/S and the rips are stunning. They are better to my ears than using a Mac drive into a Macbook Pro using DBPoweramp. Not just my ears but I have played different rips for people and they can tell within a few seconds which they prefer and its always the Melco. Rips seem to have more space, air and slam. A lot of people say this is nonsense and can’t be so but my ears, my cash.
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Thanks, Steve. I don’t doubt you for a moment. I wonder if I can persuade Melco to lend me one for a day…
Was saying that all D100 owners found it superior .
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All Apple owner say the iPhone is superior to every other phone. Doesn’t make it true.
The only real difference between rippers I have found is drive offset, which results in either more or less silent samples at the start and end of each track. And yes I have listened to some Melco rips and same cd ripped via dbpoweramp and a regular cd drive. Remove the offset so they all can play at the same time they are identical in all ways, I have used audio software to analyse them and seamless switch between each one whilst listening via dac and headphones. I have played them back through many DACs and other hardware put them on random for some idea of a blind test could hear no difference.
However before I could compare the tracks this way
which I thought I could hear a minor difference but after many repeated tests I could not. Or perhaps I imagine it in the first place.
This offset is present in every ripper as all drives are inaccurate at seeking to any track it’s all within a given tolerance. So could this offset be what’s causing these differences people say they hear? Perhaps it changes how the samples are decoded in the DAC? The actual musical data is the same I have proved this so perhaps Melco use this offset to their advantage and find it gets more pleasing results with their hardware? Are DACs really sensitive to these sample offsets and could they really make sq difference at all? Or there is no difference and it’s all just nonsense.
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Merci fr.
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The data-drives used for ripping had a relatively short development life between the mid 90’s mulimedia-CD:s to mid 00’s when internet replaced them. And some firmware implementations had various bugs. You should remember reading the data off a CD is an analog process then inrerpreted by the firmware into a bitstream.
Personally I use the full height Pioneer blu-ray writers which are said to have one of the better firmwares. Make sure the drive is level, have a good psu and have a box that keep light out. Some kind of vibration isolation also is a good idea.
I always clean the CD in an ultrasound bath before a rip. Anything you can do to make it easier to recreate the bitstream. Perhaps the old CD-pens that made the edge of the CD green. Or a demagnetizer.
I use XLD to rip then my own meta-data app for Roon and the lower-end Roon Nucleus server. I hope to be able to borrow a Melco D100 again soon.
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Note to self: reading up on some technical details is useful:
Lots of scope to get inaccuracies.
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Hi CG,
For a non Cartesian spirit like me it’s easier to admit that the Melco rips better 
That’s an articulate process. Very good.
I’m just beginning the Ripping and NAS, process for my system, and I’m starting out fairly basic. DbPoweramp, Minimserver, Synology NAS etc. And I’ll just be using my computer DVD drive to begin with.
I had no idea that the reading of a CD was an analog process. Thanks for the info.
Dave
Hi Eagle,
It’s a PlexWriter premium 2.
I bouth it 13 years ago as one of the last available of this modelthen. It can rip a cd at 4 and burn at 2 times. I hugely used it for ripping and burning TayoYuden and Sieveking cdr’s. This all stopped when I bought the nd5xs2 and discovered Qobuz 
Regards Gerben
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Thanks Gerben. I’m thinking it’s a toss-up between the Buffalo, which still has limited availability, or whether to shell-out for the D100 and sell the week-old Mk3 (to someone who can make proper use of its streaming etc). I still buy CD’s of content I can’t find on Qubuz so ripping remains an ongoing need, albeit comparatively minimal.
The D100 also works as a cd player (USB out put needs to be enabled on an N10) when other old folks come round with a cd to listen to, with the option to (steal) rip it if you like the cd and ther is music out there that is not on any streaming platform. The D100 sound is about as good as a CD5 as a player. I’m in the D100 rips sound better than other rips but to quote steve above “A lot of people say this is nonsense and can’t be so but my ears, my cash.” and I’ve got a bonus cd player.
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Hi Frenchrooster. I would like to contact you privately. My email is: arnaud@delaboulaye.net.
Thanks
Arnaud
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