Digitize LPs with zero loss?

Excellent; this is just the kind of feedback I was
looking for. Could you rank those better converters?
(What should I look for first, maybe a model number?)
(I don't mind having a terabyte of disk space.)

Also, I am unsatisfied with the sound of CDs and was
hoping to keep the richness of vinyl in the transition.
When you say you would have been better off buying the
CDs are you saying that the digitized LPs sounded like
CDs? Can you distinguish the LP from your best digitized
version? If so, that's not what I'm hoping for. (Maybe
the best converters still don't capture the whole signal?)

Thanks,
Brad

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?

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

I'd like to give my favorite LPs a rest and tap into the convenience of digital format music.

I'm a user interface designer specializing in informaiton visualization (see http://didi.com/brad if you like) and it is clear to me that existing audio-shuffling software is in its infancy. I'd like to put together something that has the feel of what I did for MoMA, the sense of TextArc, smarter associative logic than Amazon.com's recommender. The front end of it will take advantage of my Toshiba M200 TabletPC and 50" Pioneer plasma touchscreen; think flick a song or style from the table up to the screen. Student of mine did a decent first step (http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~paley/spring03/assignments/HWFINAL/bgb10) but there's still a mile to go...

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.

you might want to look into the Alesis masterlink - Michel Fremer (Stereophile vinyl guy) uses it to make CDs of different cartridge/arm combinations. If it's good enough to really catch that level of subtlety.... It can even make CDRs (playable only on itself, though) of hi-rez stuff - about 20 min. per CDR