As somewhat of a purist regarding such things (basically totally anal in truth) I want a good quality turntable and amp system to do any LP encoding. The quality of the equipment always has an impact when doin reproductions and even under best case scenarios any reproduction also carries with it a certain amount of overall loss, and in this case that loss can equate to quite a bit if the equipment itself is sub par.

Something a lot of folks have never fully understood about the concept of Dolby filtering is that the reduction of noise, hiss, etc. always comes at the cost of loss of the overall signal being filtered too. Dolby uses compression technology to effectively limit the reproduction of both the upper and lower ranges of sound to achieve their result.

I've swayed several folks away from using Dolby filtering by showing them with sound tests on their own equipment how Dolby can tend to muffle the bass and decrease the crispness of the higher end sounds too. In my opinion, with the increased quality of digital sound reproductions these days Dolby is a lot more of a marketing/branding/sales tool than it is in actually working to produce overall clarity in sound reproduction.

In digital file choices available today there's also a HUGE difference between the common 128 bit rate .mp3 files and say a 256 bit rate file. These differences are even more pronounced when using higher bit rate .ogg files though my faves are the totally uncompressed .flac files I most prefer. These files are HUGE by comparison but with HD space as cheap as it is these days it dudn much matter, so ...

Having shown folks a side by side sound test using various formats and bit rates of digital music files the .flac files always get the nod from every single music fan I've exposed to their increased range and clarity.

Back in the 80s JVC offered their own system called ANRS (automatic noise reduction system) and Super ANRS for their high end cassette tape decks. With my Super ANRS deck and simply high bias quality TDK tape I was able to produce tapes far superior to what was commercially available even when recording from LPs, something that should never have been possible since the record labels had the actual master tapes to reproduce their retail tapes from.

My plans to rip/encode my old LPs will stay on hold till I can locate a nice receiver/amp that has a flat line input/output capability. I'll use Audacity to digitally make any changes to the .flac files I'll be using to encode with