Good to hear you're an audiophile too dude, I may lean on ya for some help once I get started doin my conversions

I remember back in the 70s when Dolby 1st started gettin attention my observations then were that it really only helped mask the inferiority of the equipment being used, yet even then it was all too obvious how much music was bein lost to their filtering/compression.

Havin always liked JVCs equipment and havin been really enamored of their amp technologies and their penchant to do tons of audio research, it was always my brand of choice until movin into the computer systems I use now instead. I agree their SANRS was still a compromise but it seemed to be way less than what Dolby was and for tapes I used to drag around in my car it did seem to clip off just enough of the high end signal to eliminate some of the hiss without appreciably losing much on the bass end of the spectrum either, so it was a decent trade off overall.

The only real reason I plan to use Audacity is since it's open source it plays well with my Ubuntu OS. I'm sure there'll be a learnin curve once I start playin with it but I hope to do as little modulation of the input signal as possible. I'm right with ya on lettin in everything you can get and then tailoring the result headed to the speakers by playin with the EQ settings.

If you haven't yet experimented with .flac files you'd be amazed at the difference in overall fullness of the sound when compared to .mp3s, even when comparing extremely high bit rates in .mp3s the .flacs will blow 'em away dynamically