Silent CD/DVD/Blu Ray drives

[vastriver]

Hello,

A few words of introduction. I am based in Dublin. Within the constraints of my budget, been an audiophile for 30 years. My work takes me overseas and during a recent assignment in Asia I had the opportunity to A/B an "April" Eximus DP1 against other popular DAC's like Yulong, Mytek, M2Tech, CIAudio. It was so much better than my own heavily Modwright'd Perpetual Technologies PIA/P3A that I hadn't changed in years that it has motivated me to experiment with what is now possible with computer audio. Rest of the system is of considerably older vintage that I have never been tempted to replace, probably due to limitations of the resolving power of the front end I am only finding time to address now. Mark Levinson 27, B&W 803, Copland 289.

Like many I imagine, I have started with a CA CAPS like build and started hacking that to see if I could squeeze some extra performance. Much to my surprise moving to a wide range Pico to allow the use of a 19v brick really did make a worthwhile difference as reported on other forums but what really surprised me was that swapping out the cheap and nasty SATA cables that came with the motherboard for heavily shielded AKASA internal SATA makes the biggest difference. They are relatively expensive at Maplin's at 11 euro, but half that price on Amazon and of course cheap as chips and really worth it for anyone who is not ready to go to Pang or JRiver SATA cables yet.

I have been really surprised at the benefits of these relatively simple changes so I have started the process of going linear and swapping out Windows 8.1 for 2012+AO. Unfortunately all the pulling apart and swapping out and my limited DIY skills have led to me to frying 2 motherboards :( Waiting for 2 replacements now.

Back to the point of the thread. Has anyone got some advice on a silent preferably blu-ray combi-ripper, suitable for the Streacom cases? That is slim-line, slot loading. I have tried the recommended OB2 but it really makes an awful racket. I have tried a few things like wrapping it in acoustic foam. But really it makes such a racket (I think mostly because it is not possible to slow it down) that it is unusable for replay purposes and I prefer to rip from my lap-top anyway which I can do mindlessly in the front of the TV without disturbing anyone else. I have seen discussions of rippers on various forums but the discussion (where there is one) is more tweaks to improve ripping accuracy. My motivation here is much simpler. All the motherboards these days have surround sound and for casual listening and WAF purposes I would really like to have the option of using a silent combi-ripper for replay. The alternative of course is to go for a different type of case and the sort of tray-loading or even top transports that the commercial manufacturers are using. Has anyone got any experience or advice on that?

First post. I'll figure out a signature next.

Many Thanks,
vastriver

[Ivor]

Welcome Vastriver, your comment "Within the constraints of my budget, been an audiophile for 30 years." means you will fit right in here! Somebody else will be along with useful information...

[nige2000]

I'd imagine most of the CA guys missed this Post
I'm sure there's some ideas here about cd dvd bluray drives for audio