Question please - will a cheap CD player be ok to make copies of CDs onto a hard drive, or will the quality of recording be noticeably poor?
I must have upwards of 200 CDs gathering dust, so time to move them on, but after I have copied them onto a stick or hard drive.
Tia…
I’ve always copied from CDs to MP3 or whatever using a cheap and cheerful external drive and a laptop, the result has always been fine.
Yes a drive like that will work fine - I’ve just finished transferring all my CDs into Apple Music using this external DVD drive:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQT96C93
…which is very similar.
External USB drives tend to be slower and more clunky than internal ones, but since our Lords and Masters have decided that physical disks are old hat and we don’t need CD or DVD drives any more, we are pretty much stuck with external ones.
The quality of the copies are dependent on the settings in the software that you use to transfer the songs, and the file format you save them in, rather than the drive itself.
For best quality you want to keep the songs in a format as close to the original as possible i.e. 44.1kHz sample rate and 16 bits; MP3 files are compressed and downsampled from that so will sound worse. I would not recommend MP3 these days.
Purists will suggest saving in FLAC format; personally I save to AIFF (uncompressed) since my computers are all Macs and I am not short of hard drive space.
If you use Apple Music or iTunes there is also Apple’s AAC format or Apple Lossless, both of which are compressed so take up less drive space.
In Apple Music look in Settings / Files / Import settings for these options, and set the preferred defaults before you import anything!
On Windows you can use WAV format if you like instead of AIFF or FLAC.
There is no point in “upsampling” audio form a CD to a higher sample or bit rate such as 96/24 as you can’t get better quality than what you put in.
I still like to listen to actual CDs (via an Audiolab CD transport and an Audalytic AH90 DAC) in my hifi system, but having everything in Apple Music means I can play anything on my phone if I’m travelling.
If you don’t have an actual hifi CD player and don;t want to bother with one you can connect your computer to a DAC via USB and thence into the “aux” input on a hifi amplifier, thus bypassing the rather basic audio DAC built into the computer.
Many DACs like the AH90 can also be used as headphone amps without a full stereo system.
Hope that helps!
Should be fine, CDs are digital so as long as you get the bits off and onto your hard drive without errors it does not matter how much money you spent to do so .
Yes bits are bits, but it’s what you do with them that counts. 
CD players sound audibly different, as do DACs. Not as different as speakers, but still different. There is the process of conversion to analog and then the various other circuits involved in getting the sound out to your ears.
In my recent spate of hifi upgrade-itis I bought a DAC that used an ESS Sabre converter chip - it sounded so bright and harsh I sent it back and swapped it for a DAC with AKM chips. Much smoother.
Computer built-in sound circuits are pretty basic and prone to noise as well.
I’ve not ripped anything for a while, but if you get a choice of bitrate to save audio then IIRC 48 was noticeably better than 44. That may relate to saving recorded audio rather than digital music from a CD unless you’re re-EQing it as I used to.
I think the software you use - and then the error-correction and format/definition (bit rate and depth) are likely to be more important than your hardware.
If you were to find that, with error handling, ripping was taking an unusual length of time, you could look at your cd reader again.
I’d be surprised if you could hear an audible difference between 48kHz and 44.1kHz sample rates (both 16 bit) of the same recording but perhaps you can. 
Super Audio CD is meant to be a lot better than standard CD but the trouble is for the SACD releases the producer has usually tinkered with the mix so it’s not really comparing apples to apples.
48 kHz is the audio sample rate standard for video (DVD, BluRay, UHD BluRay, and recording live audio such as interviews etc.) whereas 44.1kHz is the spec for “consumer” Red Book CD audio.
Once upon a time it mattered (bringing a 44.1kHz audio track into a 48kHz video project could cause some gremlins) but nowadays the hardware and software can cope with either, both, or a mixture.
But there is unlikely to be any benefit in ripping a CD to 48KHz (or to anything higher than 44.1kHz basically) - you’re just resampling you won’t get any extra quality.
Maybe if you were doing a lot of treatment to an audio recording there might be some point in bouncing it up to higher sample rate but in that case you’d be using pro software and going to something like 96/24 so as to have more dynamic range. But that’s probably not relevant to Adam’s use case of ripping CDs for convenience.
CDs are natively 44.1kHz so I would always rip to that first - if you need the recording can be upsampled to 48kHz later.
At the time CDs seemed to be a huge amount of data. these days 600MB seems almost tiny but modern PCs are likely to have more than enough storage to keep uncompressed copies of hundreds of discs so keeping an exact copy, separate to any processed copy should not be an issue.
Players, yes - CD drives (and the title of the thread should really have been drive not player) not so much as they just have the digital bits.
In respect of computer CD drives or DVD drives I would totally agree - they are pretty basic and with error correction should pass the data through.
In a hifi context the quality of the CD mechanism can make a bit more difference (though not as much as the DAC that does the actual decoding) - a posher CD transport does a better job of reducing jitter and therefore passing a cleaner signal to the DAC. My Audiolab 6000CDT transport has a bigger than average read-ahead buffer and so copes much better with scratched disks than a basic player (I used to use a Sony X700 UHD Blu Ray player as a CD player before I got the Audiolab/Audalytic combo).
Anyway that’s not really relevant to the OP’s question, for which an external computer DVD drive should be perfectly adequate.
Thanks everyone - I will let you all talk techy as it has mostly gone over my head 
In light of your positives, I will go ahead with the Amazon jobbie at 20€, and start transferring my CDs onto a few sticks in MP3 format as this seems to be the universal basic for music.
Actually one more please - re USB sticks, is there any technical difference between a small and large capacity? I am thinking several smaller sticks in case one ever fails, but, nowadays do these sticks fail? Am I right to use several smaller ones against a large one?
Apologies for deviating into tech gibberish!
If you are happy with MP3 quality that’s fine - though personally I would go with a format that preserves sound quality. But it depends what you will be using to listen to the music with. Via a cheap set of bluetooth earbuds from a phone MP3 will be adequate; through a hifi system or higher quality headphones you would probably appreciate the better sounds from (say) Apple AAC or WAV.
If you do go with MP3 use the highest bit rate available.
As for USB sticks, I don;t think it matters what size you use - reliability with those is more about the brand and manufacturing quality. Also beware as there are a lot of fakes about, and also USB drives that misrepresent their capacity. It’s a common trick to put a cheap 8GB chip inside a USB and fake the controller chip’s table of contents to make it appear to a computer as a 128GB USB stick.
What then happens is that as you copy data to it, it gets repeatedly overwritten, and of course the contents get lost.
Ali Express and similar websites are full of such rubbish - e.g. this “Lenovo 2TB USB 3 drive” (which they call a 128GB drive in the listing!) for just 62 pence!!
(and I can 100% guarantee it’s not made by Lenovo!
USB sticks from a decent brand are no better or worse than any other solid state drive - they all have a lifespan depending on how much they get used and what conditions they are stored in.
In any case you need to have backups of your music, on ordinary computer drives as well as on the USB sticks, especially if you are planning to sell off your CDs (which personally I would not do).
Go with USB sticks from name brands such as Kingston, Sandisk, Lexar, Transcend or Toshiba. If you get them from Amazon, make sure they are being sold by Amazon themselves and not by a Marketplace reseller.
Even Amazon themselves get caught by fakes occasionally, but it’s less likely.
200 CD are nothing in terms of memory these days.
To import your CDs you need to use something - iTunes or whatever Windows offers these days are the norm. You create a Library in the process - it’s that Library you use to find and play stuff (like flipping through your CDs). For a library to work using an external drive you really need the whole lot on one drive
Thanks!
I am aware of all the scams re USB sticks and tend to use Sandisk and pay a bit extra from reputable suppliers.
My litening is pretty basic: in the car and/or headphones on a train…
It’s been a while - recollection can become hazy, although I was listening back through kit sufficiently ok that I might have heard something.
With marketing BS it can be quite tricky, high endurance are the ones I usually buy, said to last longer for cctv cameras and especially dash cams that overwrite the recording a lot. Had a few of the non high endurance (insert fancy BS title) from Scandisc, etc fail.
Yes it’s really hard to know with audio if you are really hearing a difference or just expecting to hear a difference! Unless it’s a really scientific double blind test…
Ok understood - “best quality” MP3 should be Ok for that, though I would still be tempted to rip the CDs to a lossless format so as to have master copies. as @chrisell mentioned we usually have plenty of drive space available for audio on modern devices. Up to you.
I don’t know if you are an Android or an Apploid, but I have everything saved as AIFF in Apple Music which then syncs to my phone via iCloud - I can listen on earbuds in the train from my phone, or connect it to the car through CarPlay - no need for USB sticky things.
But whatever works for you.
I have never invested a lot of money in high fi systems and top of the range speakers so my standards are low. As a teenager I had a reasonably large cassette tape collection but never more than a few LPs. As an adult my point of reaching having some disposable income and the introduction of CDs overlapped and I ended up with lots. Out of the box I can only remember one where the sound quality was poor. What I can say is that compared to the music I used to listen to on tape through the mediocre equipment in my house and car every single CD sounded better in every way than any of the tapes. I’m in awe of people who can tell the difference between one CD format and another. Pre iPod/pad/phone I had a lot of my music on Mini-Discs, that was a format that I really liked.
Yes I liked Mini-Disc - though having to type in the disc information by hand was a bit of a PITA!
The machines were nice and compact and the sound quality was close to CD, though it was compressed.
I think iPods and MP3 players killed the format off.
There’s a guy on YouTube called Mat (his channel name is “Techmoan”) who you might have come across - he’s a big fan of Minidiscs and has done several videos on them. He specialises in making informative videos about obsolete audio and video formats.
