I converted about 50 albums to digital before actually sitting down and listening to the CDs for an evening. I found that although the vinyl sounded normal to me when using a phonograph, they were somehow harsh and not pleasant when played the digital transfers.
It’s subltle but you should probably sit and listen to your digital transfers for a few hours before spending too much time transferring all those albums.
Of course, it may be hardware related. I connected the Receiver to the computer sound card using RCA cords. I’m not familiar with Tarratec, it may give you better results.
Did your equipment apply the RIAA equalization? LPs are recorded with weak bass and strong treble. Amplifiers are supposed to reverse this on their LP input (but newer ones may not have that anymore). If you just ran the LP to the computer, you probably didn't correct for this unless your software was expecting input from vinyl.
Back when everone and their mother were downoading ‘free’ music off of Napster, I heard some transfers from vinyl that sounded absolutely terrible. It pretty much ended my thoughts about investing in the equipment to convert my 800 + LP’s to a digital format.
A bottle of Windex and soft towel do wonders for those older LP’s that are found in the bargain bin and have alot of surface grime and dust. Even with a few scratches, some of these gems sound wonderful if you have a semi-decent turntable hooked up to a semi-decent sound system.
(Sorry, I love the sound of vinyl!)
I have a record player that can transfer audio directly to a computer to encode in either .WAV, .MP3 or .OGG audio formats. I found out that the best balance between sound quality and file size is 256 kbps data rate when encoding in .MP3 format with the LAME MP3 encoder.