I plan on ripping all my vinyl to mp3's and I figured that (1) since
the computer is a noisy environment and (2) I can't get an analog
signal to make it from my stereo to my computer without a 60 Hz
ground-loop hum, I went and bought an A2D box that has no brand name
and merely calls itself an "AD-2000". It takes RCA stereo audio in,
and puts out digital audio on both toslink and coax.

So, all is now peachy, as my soundcard has toslink in.

Though maybe it's not quite so peachy as I first thought.... the
AD-2000 box has no gain control. The only control it has is a switch
that let's you set its output to either 44.1 kHz or 48.0 kHz.

So, I was figuring for a while that this box must be conservative and
have a relatively low gain so as to not risk saturating the digital
signal. Au contraire -- when I recorded a record onto my hard disk,
the recording meters in the software peak very close to 0 db.

So, I'm guessing now that this box must be making significant use of
compression. The question is how much is this compression going to
ruin the enjoyment of my records? If I'm encoding them to mp3's
anyway (using "lame" and "alt-present-standard"), I'm clearly not
going for a completely golden-ear solution. I would like "reasonably
listenable", however.

What do you guys think?

|oug