[Osadu]

I have been downloading all of my CDs onto an external hard drive for use with my BDA/BDP-1 combo.  See setup below.  I would like suggestions and recommendations to improve (if any) my musical experience with the BDA,BDP-1 combo.

Seagate 500 Gigabytes External Harddive
dBpoweramp CD ripper software
Flac Format
Lossless Uncompressed Encoding

Should I be doing something differently? 
Is my hard drive size too large?
Should I use a powered USB hub?  Will it help?
Should I use a different software? 
Should I rip to a different format other than FLAC? 
Should I use a different encoding method? 
Please let me know your thoughts.

[srb]

Should I be doing something differently?

Is my hard drive size too large?  No.

Should I use a powered USB hub?  Will it help?  No, only if your external drive is bus powered and exceeds the current draw available from the rear USB port.  Most all 2.5" drives are within spec, some 3.5" bus powered drives can draw too much current, expecially those > 500GB.

Should I use a different software?  No. dBpoweramp is good.

Should I rip to a different format other than FLAC?  Not necessarily.  I use uncompressed AIFF only because I use a PC with different software players and FLAC is not compatible with all of them.

Should I use a different encoding method?  You mentioned "Lossless Uncompressed" encoding, but if you're using FLAC, it's compressed.  Lossless, but compressed, that's the whole idea.  dBpoweramp indicates level 8 setting is best.  It's a bit slower to rip is all.   

Please let me know your thoughts.
 
 
I think you're good to go.
 
Steve

[Osadu]

Thanks srb.

[jjc1]

Thanks srb.

  Try converting to WAV. Bigger files but I hear a difference. Compare a few Flac downloads with their counterparts in WAV and see if you hear a differnce.