Innuos with Warwick Aperio

[ARD53]

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:

External CD Ripper & ZEN/ZENith Next-Gen - Innuos - High-Fidelity Digital Music Servers and Streamers

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.

innuos.com

Regarding trade-in, if you follow us on social media and wait until this weekend, there might be some news announced about this...

I looked up getting a Buffalo optical drive to use with my Zen-NG, there are many available and types and settings etc to determine the offset values etc. Can you please recommend a specific drive that will work without a lot of hassles etc? I went through the Drip and accurate rip information and its not to me so straight forward which model is best etc?

 

[Stephen Healy]

I looked up getting a Buffalo optical drive to use with my Zen-NG, there are many available and types and settings etc to determine the offset values etc. Can you please recommend a specific drive that will work without a lot of hassles etc? I went through the Drip and accurate rip information and its not to me so straight forward which model is best etc?

All you need to really know from a config perspective is the drive offset value, which in the case of Buffalo is +6. Once it is set in Sense, the drive will completely behave as if it is an integrated CD ripper.