Can digitizing vinyl match CD?

A couple years ago I heard Michael Fremer demo some CDs he'd made from his LPs. In his case he had the best LP playback rigs imaginable. The CDs were easily better sounding than commercial ones.

As to ripping to 24/96 or 24/88.2, those sampling rates and word length handily beat redbook. A month ago I was at another hi-fi event and heard both redbook and 24/88.2 hi-rez versions of some recordings. The 24/88.2 rips sound very close to LP--not quite, but close--and they're way more emotive and involving than 16/44.1.

I consider the 24 bits more important than the sampling frequency, at least above 48K. 16 bit only gives you 64K increments of amplitude; 24 bit gives you 16M increments. That difference in amplitude resolution is where musical expression of the artist and the beginnings and ends of notes lives.

I have an upscale front end and seriously would like to look into high rate digital rips of my lps for my second system, etc

enjoy the emotion of vinyl and if I can get most of that back I would be very pleased

threads I've read are confusing
would you recommend a stand alone burner/player
or using a d/a and computer (hard drive or straight burn)

you can pm me if this has been reitereated infinitum

thanks
Tom

fwiw I use an Apogee Rosetta 200 AD/DAC with a firewire connection to an iMac running Amadeus Pro. Very, very happy with the results at 24/96.
It's not vinyl but jeez it's close.

I am using the Alesis Masterlink and my secret weapon for getting great sounding recordings to CD is using the Wadia 17 Analog to Digital converter. I go record out of my preamp into the Wadia and then XLR digital to the Masterlink. Compared to using the converters in the Masterlink this is a night and day difference. There are newer and probably better units out there than the Wadia. You can't just plug your table into the crap converters in a computer and expect to get great sound.

It is true that the quality of the table, cart, phono stage all determines the sound of the final recording. Even the cables from the preamp affect the recording.

Just to confirm that even using a cheap (not crap) Creative audigy notebook card, I get better music from my vinyl than I do from CD. Even though I have to downsample from 24/96 to 16/44. My main issue, now, is why there are no small players able to play the higher format directly. My Cowon D2 does a good job, but it only handles downsampled (CD-level) formats. Even if this is a bit of work (and hassle), there is no competition, vinyl wins. When you start doing this, you don't want to go back.

It is a bit of a dilemma, though. Ideally, I would like to record in the best way possible, e g using the new Korg with high-speed DSD, supposedly "future proof". Yet the portable player market hasn't even climbed to 24/96 yet; the bigger files will take more space, more time to convert, and so on. I already have a collection of analog tapes, and also DAT tapes, on my loft. I enjoy the 50 albums I have recorded in 24/96. But I don't like the feeling that I may have to do it all over again!