I would love to read about such a shootout of current top Hirez A to D converters in an audiophile environement. As far as I remember last time I read about such think was in WBF, when Bruce Brown picked a converter to digitize David Wilson tapes.
Can I ask you for a short explanation of the four geek like words of the second line of your signature - Dig Rip? Google only managed to confuse me!
Relatively quick answer. A decade ago after retirement, I decided that my 15K record and tape collection (95% classical) would not be an inheritance my daughter and her family would easily accept, but they loved the music in the collection. So with my wife's support I decided to convert 10K of the albums to digital (no DSD at the time). So I had a consultant, Tim Marutani, bring together the best pro software and hardware at the time (2009) and he arranged a shootout conducted by Paul Stubblebine at my home. Among attendees were Chris Connaker of Computer Audiophile and Maier Shadi of Audio Salon in LA. We ended up choosing Pyramix software from Merging Technologies with their Mykerinos card, a Pacific Microsonics Model Two A to D converter and I had a custom Bottlehead phono preamp with variable EQ and balanced outputs built. Chris Connaker built the computer that I still use today on occasion to rip. We tried Sonic Solutions (Amarra) pro software and Pure Vinyl also with both PC and Apple computers and different A to D converters including one from MSB and one from Sonic Solutions-Amarra and one whose name slips my mind but that Doug Sax had recommended. In the end I chose the only A to D which was not on the market, the Model Two. Fortunately Tim went on a multimonth search and a Model Two was located at Warner Bros studios, and that is the one I have. I had met the principals of Merging Technologies the year before when Tim had taken them to my home to hear about my project when they were considering whether to go into the consumer market. He was able to convince them to give me a big discount on their Pyramix software, since I would be only using a small fraction of the features of it for my project.
As I started the actual project, Tim had mastering engineer Mike Romanowski teach me how to use the Model Two and recording engineer and producer Mark Willsher teach me how to use Pyramix, as well as introduce me to Izotope RX software for declicking. He also wrote a bunch of macros for me to make using Pyramix easier.
At the end it took me about 6 years to do the project and I ended up with about 40TB of 192/24 files.