Digitize LPs with zero loss?

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

Okay; excellent guys; thanks!
And I will surely post ant interface playing I do--thanks
for the kind words.

Now I have this list to look out for:

o Metric Halo ULN-2 or 2882
o Alesis Masterlink 9600

(But the above sample at only 96 kHz--Am I wrong to be
considering this?) And, at 192 kHz:

o Benchmark DAC1 (now) and ADC1 (when it's available)
(They "All sample rates playback with a 52-kHz analog
bandwidth" is that good? Does anything play back with
a full 192 kHz if it's sampled that high?)
o Apogee Rosetta 200 (This one doesn't specify a playback
analog bandwidth--might that imply 192 kHz?)
o Mytek Stereo192ADC and Stereo96DAC (which plays back
192 kHz streams, but the unit's name seems to imply
that it's downsampled--but perhaps I'm just not reading
something on http://www.mytekdigital.com/stereo96.htm
that specifies this, due to my newness at this game...)

Have I left anything out?

Also Id' be especially grateful if anyone has tested any
two or more of these things and can report what they heard.

Or is there some clearinghouse site that keeps comparing
these things, like people do PC video game boards?

If your thinking about an outboard DAC you have to seriously through in Grace Design's, Lunatec V3. In my experience it betters the others, e.g., Benchmarks and Apogee's. And, its ANSR dithering is really nice for red book 44/16.

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.