Regarding the CD ripper, it does not connect to your Apeiro, it connect to the ZENith Next-Gen. The ZENith Next-Gen comes with a minimum of 3 USB ports so you will have plenty spare for connecting an external CD ripper to. The Mac Superdrive will work as a ripper I'm sure, the only trouble with those is it is quite tricky to determine the drive offset value to ensure a bitperfect rip.
But once the CD drive is connected, it behaves exactly as if it were an integrated one like the ZENith Mk3, and you still have all the same FLAC/WAV, Fast/Slow options etc. We have a small overview of it here:
This guide will show you the simple process of using an external USB optical drive for CD ripping on to ZEN Next-Gen/ZENith Next-Gen.
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Regarding trade-in, if you follow us on social media and wait until this weekend, there might be some news announced about this...