Hi there Graham,
If given the money you would (or have) bought a stereo or home theatre system and spent over $5000 I suggest this based on my own experiences:
1) MJ using Monkey's Audio Compression only [actually, any non-lossy scheme is fine, but Monkey's Audio KICKS A**!]
2) Audio card - use the coax digital output. $249
http://www.midiman.net/products/m-audio/dio2496.php3) PC - perhaps an Asus or Abit or any not to big, not to small brand motherboard..... You will be happy as long as it is at least 500Mhz (any brand/model), 256MB RAM (128 is probably plenty), Windows 2000, SCSI [on board, or PCI card - needed for the CD reader I recommend]
4) CD Reader. I have ripped about 400 CDs. I've never gotten rip speed below 12x for ANY audio CD. It rips in one read across the CD. Rip the same CD 8 times. You will get BIT FOR BIT the same data 8 times.
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/ultraplex_wide.html [I see they've made it a bit faster since I bought mine].
5) hard drives, hard drives, hard drives
This system will easily perform as well as a high end audio source.
If given the money you would not buy a stereo or home theatre system and spent over $5000 I suggest this based on my own experiences:
1) MJ using Monkey's Audio Compression [ you can save money on hard drive space by using a lossfull scheme - in which case I would vote for any current VBR encoder - beware discussing this topic in a public forum]
2) Audio card. Pretty much any current audio card is pretty good. If you have a digital input on your receiver (or pre-amp) and want a card with digital output treat yourself nice and get the MidiMan Delta AP2496 (link above).
3) PC - perhaps an Asus or Abit or ..... You will be happy as long as it is at least 500Mhz (any brand/model), 256MB RAM (128 is probably plenty), Windows 2000, SCSI [on board, or PCI card]
4) CD Reader. I have ripped about 400 CDs. I've never gotten rip speed below 12x for ANY audio CD. It rips in one read across the CD. Rip the same CD 8 times. You will get BIT FOR BIT the same data 8 times.
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/ultraplex_wide.html [I see they've made it a bit faster since I bought mine].
5) hard drives, hard drives, hard drives
One of the nice things about using digital output is that you can put the computer out of earshot and run a radio shack off the shelf antenna style cable (RG59, RG6 etc - the stuff every store sells and every home has tons of).
Finally if you want a rich support environment in your endeavours, supported by actual experts in the music production (and video production) field - like dolby labs engineers and the like check out
http://www.avsforum.com . It has a section on Home Theatre PCs (HTPC). It turns out that a PC makes a better DVD player then a DVD player does. It also turns out the PCs make better line doublers than say, Faroudja does. Over the last 2 years or so we turned all these corners. Computers are now cheaper for high end audio and video then dedicated equipment.
Have Fun!!!!!!
ram
BTW if you have a ton of CDs you may want to use either a RAID contoller ($100 by promise) or some simple file sync software to keep a redundant copy of the CDs you've ripped in case you have a drive failure.