> all about the DAC, no?

Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.

it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner

most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches