OK, thanks to MatMan's advice in the other thread the rest of this fell into place.
I had read too many posts along the lines of "recording your LPs at 16/44.1 will work fine, it's just that you are going to end up recording them all again later" to feel comfortable buying into a 16/44.1 ADC, so the next phono+ADC up was the Furutech ADL GT40/GT40a (a or alpha is the new version intro'ed a couple of years ago). The GT40 shows up used for a decent price, the DAC, headphone amp and ADC are all very well regarded, but the phono stage always seems to come across as the weak link in reviews.
(comments about the phono stage reminded me of the Feng Shui analysis of my new house, which could be neatly summarized with one word... "regrettable")
The GT40a seems to have an improved phono stage (although it was hard to be sure) but bought new they get expensive if I'm only planning to use it for LP ripping. If you use more of the functionality they still seem like a good deal though.
So what to do ? There seemed to be no shortage of well-regarded ADC/DAC's at a good price once I learned the magic term "audio interface", although it was a bit tough at first translating pro audio terminology back into something I understood.
Once I figured out that the 1/4" TRS phone jacks were being used for mono balanced signals (differential) rather than stereo things started to make a bit more sense, and after I realized the interfaces were designed so you could use a TS plug to input/output a normal consumer audio signal (unbalanced RCA) they seemed like a pretty good solution except that they didn't give me an solution for the phono stage portion of the LP ripping chain.
Then it hit me... this was no different from recording cassette tapes with favorite songs (in lieu of the TEAC 3340 I really really wanted but could never afford), and I already had a perfectly good receiver (the HK 3270) with tape monitor jacks, 2 sets in fact. After an abortive test using an LP I hadn't played in years, I concluded that the phono stage in my receiver would be good enough for now, and that I could hook the audio interface in just like a tape deck.
(the test was phono into the receiver, Rec Out from receiver to Line In on the TubeDAC hooked up as pre-amp... once I used an LP I was familiar with, it sounded just fine)
With that in place, all I needed was the right audio interface. I do pretty much everything except timesheets in Linux these days, so the Roland Quad-Capture was out for now (I was looking for easy, not another heroic struggle) and the leaders seemed to be M-Audio M-Track2/2M and Scarlett 2i2. The M-Audio units seemed a bit more attractive in pretty much every way including price, but the Scarlett 2i2 seemed like the most used on Linux so I wussed out and ordered one of those plus two 1/4" TS to RCA stereo cables.
(TS = Tip/Sleeve, what we think of as mono, while TSR = Tip/Sleeve/Ring which we think of as stereo... but in pro audio Tip is one side of a differential pair ("hot"), Ring is the other side of the pair ("cold") and Sleeve is the actual ground)
I won't have any time to play with this for a week or two so ordered from Amazon with Cheapskate Shipping... will update when it comes in and I get the first album ripped.
Regarding the whole 24/96 vs 16/44 thing, after a lot of reading I concluded that (a) doing the initial recording at 24/96 is worth it, (b) opinions about 24/96 vs 16/44 playback seem to depend on the quality of the algorithm used for sample rate conversion.
For the moment the plan is to capture at 24/96, keep everything at 24/96 initially so I can go back and split into tracks and do noise reduction, then revisit the decision when I start running out of storage.
EDIT - hey, I guess if I added a decent microphone this would give me a good solution for running room analysis software, although I suppose the mic in on the built-in sound chip would probably have done the job already.
Last edited by bridgman; 08/13/17 05:12 AM.
