Some random thoughts...
I posted a couple of essays on this topic quite a while ago. You might still be able to find them if you search for the forum archive.
The Sound Blaster Audigy is a pretty good card. I have one. Well, considering that you can find them for as low as $52-57 or so, they're quite a bargain. You could probably find a Sound Blaster Live Value for about $20, though, and that may also be good for what you want. The difference is that the Audigy has a 24-bit DAC, which should give you higher quality sound (although it can only record in 16 bits).
Frankly, you're going to need a spectacular playback system, golden ears, or both to hear a difference.
Having a true 24-bit capable card would probably produce an even better sound, I'm sure, but I don't have one myself.
Here's the big problem that I see with the Audigy: It doesn't have very good connectivity. In giving you true digital I/O and FireWire, they sacrificed the more hi-fi connections that they had on their older cards. I used to own a Sound Blaster 64 Gold, and it had gold-plated RCA line-outs, and seperate mic-in and line-in minijacks.
The Audigy has a minijack out, which seems to clip easily with high-output stuff like games and movies. And it has just one mic/line in. If you're using a mic, you click a checkbox in the mixer to automatically boost the incoming signal +20 dB. Now, I don't have the electrical engineering knowledge that some people on the BBS do, but to me all-in-one solutions are always a big question mark - thus I question how well the Audigy's line in works as a hi-fi solution.
Using the seperate line-in on my SB64Gold, the resulting .wav file always sounded exactly the same as the incoming sound to me. I haven't played with the Audigy enough to come to a conclusion about it... I'm tempted to say that I don't think it sounds as good, but it
should sound
better. So I'm not sure. And if you check the review of the Audigy at Tomshardware.com, for instance, their results show the card to be an excellent near-professional solution.
Your mileage may vary. I definitely plan to check out the Audiophile as soon as I can afford one. I really want to know if my impression of the Audigy is just my ears playing tricks on me.
Now, on to some vinyl-specific stuff. Again, your mileage may vary here - like everybody always says, trust your own ears first and foremost. Only you know what you like to hear.
The Sound Blaster Audigy also has onboard DSP, like a lot of other sound cards, for removing noise and pops. I haven't tried it myself, but I do have Steinberg's Clean! software, which does the same things. I've found that it can do a lot to make severely damaged recordings more listenable, but at the same time it can make good recordings sound very bad.
Those "de-clickers" absolutely do work as advertised - they can remove vinyl pops almost completely. However, it stands to reason that anything that alters one aspect of a sound is going to alter every other aspect, too. I've found that "de-clicking" vinyl recordings removes almost all of the "air" in them, too... whatever that characteristic is that makes records nice to listen to. You're left with a recording that has no pops, but it also is completely lifeless.
In my opinion, if you want to optimize your transfers, you're much better off improving the source. I've found that cleaning my records has made a drastic improvement in their sound. In fact, I made .wav recordings to test this (I just listen to my records as they are - I've never had the time or energy to try a CD transfer project). I wish I would have kept the samples, because this isn't the first time that this subject has come up since then. I ended up getting rid of the samples when I needed to free up some hard drive space - at the time I just had a 3GB drive and no CD burner.
I experimented with some records that had no collector's value, and could easily be replaced for just a couple of bucks. The most prominent one was a copy of "Tommy" - the records were obviously quite dusty from time, so I thought that would be a good way to test whether cleaning would improve the sound. I sampled the record before and after cleaning it, and A/B'd the two recordings. The difference was honestly like night and day. The post-cleaning sample still wasn't completely pop-free, but it was far, far better. A lot less of the bad stuff, but all of the good.
Anyway, it's worth a try. Obviously it hasn't been shown how records hold up several years after being cleaned, so I don't know if I'd clean a record that can't be replaced. But I think cleaning is preferrable to a "de-click" DSP.
