I admittedly did not peruse all the various threads here...but one option would be to find a decent phono pre-amp (I'd suggest a DB Systems DB-1A which is one of THE quietest phone sections I've heard) and either take it direct via a spare analog in or a free digital in. You can occasionally find these (DB Systems) on ebay for around $100 to $200. They also make a moving-coil preamp for the phono stage. Again, you could always send it to either a free set of the analog inputs (i.e. take the TAPE OUT signal (which is fixed)) or if you prefer send the TAPE OUT signal to an outboard ADC and take that into a free digital input. Here's one source (for an outboard ADC) and I suspect there are countless others - warning...this is 'inforamtion-only' as I don't know a lot about this ADC...it's just to reinforce the concept:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl...._ID=16156&DID=7

I would guess that the biggest effect on phono sound quality would be in the analog section (noise, RIAA equalization accuracy etc)...so I'd sink the bulk of the investment there (analog preamp) and get a reasonable ADC to digitize the resulting line-level RIAA-equalized phono signal(I know....heresy...but again...assuming you run out of analog inputs and end up having spare S/PDIF or TOSLINK inputs available).

Just my $0.02