expensive hifis and speakers just to play burned cds am i wasting my money

Are all of your CDs 'burned'?

When you say 'burned', do you mean audio CDs created from mp3s?

How many of these 7000 have you paid for?

yes should have said.sorry

So let me get this right...you've burned 7000 CDs from downloaded MP3s?

Daft question, but why? And yes, the quality of the MP3s will determine how good they're going to sound (or not).

about 2500 are from itunes on my very old pc and the rest were actual cds imported into itunes.i then sold all them and have just been burning albums to disc for work and the car for about 2 years now.

This isn't answering your question either, but you do know don't you that after you've sold the CDs it's illegal to keep copies of them...

yes your quite right on that one.but nobody wants the actual cd once its imported to itunes.hence the reason im in the s#@t now i want to buy a proper hifi system .apple have taken away the optical drive  aswell its all very annoying.

personally, i think copy cd's are alright for use in the car, but for home use they really do lack quality.

if you have all your music on itunes i think you are better off buying some kit to stream that music to an amp, and decent speakers.

i'm sure some people will know specifically what to reccomend, but i wouldn't bother with an expensive cd player.

cheap cd/dvd rom drives for your computer can be found on ebay.  I bought one for £15 specifically for ripping my CDs (only 480-odd!) and the results it gives are absolutely identical to the rips from the drive in my Mac, as proved in the recent thread I posted.

There's not much you can do to rejouvenate the MP3s you've already ripped, but to be honest, if you ripped them all at 320kbps, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference without a side-by-side comparison, and some people can't tell even then.

Taken aside the legality issue, I would first consolidate all of your music onto one HDD preferably an (external one). Using iTunes Match, you can then create a complete copy of your library in the cloud. This library will be at 256 Kbps AAC and you are likely to not notice a differenc between these and the original CD.

You have no CDs left so these files will be as good as your are likey to get and will be the new lowest denominator for bit rate. Create a new iTunes library on your Mac HDD by downloading your cloud library and use this as a primary library, back up the Mac with Time Machine on the spare HDD and do so again on a regular basis.

From here you will be well on your way to an organised library that will sound great through a hifi of some description. I could make a recomendation here too, but that's for another time.

+1 for that too.

I agree.

If my CDs weren't redbook I'd be looking at a way of streaming my collection rather than bothering with a CDP. But, no, decent amplification and speakers will not be wasted.

I'd be inclined to think that the quality of the underlying recording and its subsequent mastering is the real benchmark of how good the resulting rip's going to be, not the MP3 rate per se.

I deliberately chose my words carefully.  Poor-quality MP3s are still going to sound rubbish no matter what you play them on.  I didn't say all MP3s were rubbish, I said that their quality will determine how good they're going to sound.  Unless you have a faulty CD ROM drive it's pretty hard to make a lousy WAV, FLAC or ALAC rip, but there are quite a few opportunities to c-o-c-k it up making MP3s.

Fair enough, so you're saying the quality of the hardware has an impact in the transference?  Or the bitrate that you choose?