Nothing... here I am to "search", see topic, thank you.
ah! I see. Your initial question was confusing because you equated the "ripper" with "hardware".
In reality, the ripper is the software that you need to rip the CDs. A computer (hardware) alone without the ripping software will do nothing for you.
For rippers, I would avoid the software products that come with the computers (iTunes, windows media, etc). The two best CD rippers (software) are Exact Audio Copy (available for free) and DBPoweramp (not free). I have used both. I recommend DBPoweramp over EAC only because it has a better graphical interphase.
The motto should be: rip once, do it right, and forget it. There are now many one-box devices that will do ripping, however, IMO they cannot compare to either EAC or DBP. Those one-box options are enticing because they are convenient (i.e., save time) but quite frankly, if you want to rip a CD and know that it is 100% done correctly with the correct metadata and best possible quality, EAC and DBP would be my only go-to options. And if you are going to rip classical music, you WILL need to fix the metadata for the ripped albums. DBP allows you to do that. Specialized tagging software like MP3TAG is highly recommended if you have a large classical CD collection to be ripped.
A NAS is an external, independent, storage that will be connected to your system via ethernet or wifi. The NAS can be accessed by multiple computers and devices connected to the same network. I have been using Drobo for over a decade and it works very well. I know of many folks that use Synology and QNAP with great success as well. The advantage of having a NAS (as opposed to the files stored in a device hard drive) is that the NAS can be accessed by other components not just the one that has the hard drive. Also, if you decide to get rid of the device, your music files remain intact in your NAS. I am not aware of an "audiophile" NAS; to me, a NAS is a NAS that stores your data and should deliver that data bit-perfect to your equipment. How it sounds will be determined by your DAC and the rest of your equipment.
