Well, Ken, I'm actually wondering about this myself. I have a few LPs (which are unavailable on CD) that I want to digitize. I think the quality of the capture all depends on the soundcard. Like you said, I assume if you are not doing any post processing, then software won't make a difference.

I'm actually interested in the E-MU 1820M soundcard for a variety of related reasons. Of course, I will have great playback, but the 1820M has an RIAA equalized phono input. (I don't have a preamp for my turntable - so this would be nice)

Does anyone have any experience with this card (or similar)? Do you think using the phono input is as good as using the regular analog input with a preamp?

-FRANKe

The soundcard is important indeed, but not as important as the front end. It's all about getting the best possible sound off the disc.
I like Sound Forge 8 and CD Architect for writing and the for it's noise reduction stuff. I also use a analog KLH transient noise filter on the phono out before recording.
The purist approach might well be to not use any noise reduction since both hardware and software solutions do have artifacts... depends what the intent is i guess

On my system i don't use a soundcard as a input device, rather i digitize the pre-amp out with a Tascam DA20II DAT machine and send the coax to a Extigy USB card straight into SF8. Then I mark the track splits as regions in the file and port it into CD Architect which will burn the CD direct to Disc at Once.

Good luck and have fun