Digitize LPs with zero loss?

There's nothing special about the MOTU converters. Metric Halo, Benchmark, Apogee & Mytek all make similarly priced converters that better MOTU's offerings. 192k sampling may or may not be necessary. You'll only know by experimenting. A 192k/24 bit file will be more than 4x the size of a redbook standard audio file. If you are going to digitize a large number of albums you'll need several high capacity hard drives plus back up drives. I've digitize nearly 1,000 albums and while the results are very good, it is an extremely time consuming process. In retrospect, with the time factored in I would have been better off simply purchasing CD versions of the albums.

Apogee makes the best quality reasonably priced A/D converters.

The digitized albums will sound like digitized albums. They can sound slightly better than equivalent commercial CD's or slightly worse. This mostly depends upon the quality of your vinyl collection. When you digitize an album you've created a very long signal path for the music. Assuming the music was originally analog tape (not necessarily a valid assumption), it's first converted to vinyl, then you convert it to digital and finally when you listen you must convert it back to analog again. There is a effect from the extra digital stages, it's subtle, but it's there. Only you can decide if it's acceptable. It's not really a question of digital being able to capture the vinyl signal, because hi-rez digital can, it has more to do with the inherent strengths and weaknesses of each medium.

Why do you want to digitize and how will you play back the audio files?

Fascinating stuff, best of luck. Definitely post updates of your efforts.

My final thoughts on sound quality issues. Accept digital for what it is, it sounds slightly different than vinyl. In some ways worst and in some ways better. From my perspective, the quick access and sorting capabilities of a hard drive based music collection overwhelms the relatively minor sonic issues. Count on spending at least 2x the playing time to digitize an album.

I only mention this product because you're a computer/software professional. If you seek the highest quality available there are DSD (SACD) encoder/workstations. SADiE is a well respected manufacturer of digital mastering workstations and they have a dedicated DSD recorder/editor that will also encode PCM data at up to 196kHz/32bit word length. It's a pro unit and is probably overkill for what you want to do, but it will allow you to record SACD data files.

At a much lower entry cost, the new Apogee AD/DA with the optional firewire interface would be an excellent choice.