Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Jason, thanks again for your comment.
"-3dB is not a good peak value. The nature of digital audio is that 'louder' means less distortion"
This is precisely my point as to why it's a good idea to record at 24 rather than 16 bits, in which case -3dB is a great peak value, leaving plenty of dynamic range and not forcing us up against the absolute maximum.
You might be interested in this rationale for staying away from 0dB by John Siau of Benchmark Audio:
https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/inside-the-dac2-part…
"You'd be lucky to get an actual noise floor of -53dB with 'average turntable + phono preamp + off the shelf soundcard'"
I'm not sure where you get that. For example, the Pro-ject RPM 1.3 is a pretty average turntable, and this link
http://www.project-audio.com/main.php?tech=rpm13&lang=en
indicates its signal/noise ratio is -70dB. Moreover, it's my experience at least that turntable noise tends to occur mostly in the lowest frequencies (rumble) - I've never used a turntable that introduced broad spectrum noise the way electronics does.
And the Xonar DX, which is a not-too-expensive sound card, provides a signal/noise ratio of -114dB according to this link
https://www.asus.com/us/Sound-Cards/Xonar_DX/
which also claims the average built-in sound card has a signal/noise ratio of -85dB.
In any case, the record surface noise also has a lot to do with this matter. And it's easy to determine for yourself that music is still audible through record surface noise.
This article is interesting and informative on the general topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording
Anyway, I'll come back to my original statement - if you want to archive your ripped LPs at 44.1/16 (or even Ogg or MP3), go right ahead. But please record them at the full resolution given by your sound card, allowing a bit extra to avoid any clipping artefacts, and convert them afterward.
Thanks for looking at this, Greg. Always good to know there is a terminal window option! Especially one that works well and offers lots of useful capabilities.