My 2c worth
My first major use of Audacity was to convert my vinyl collectionn (and subsequently my wife’s vinyl collection).
The objectives were to produce good quality compressed audio on my iPod but also to provide high quality uncompressed files to play on my hi-fi rig (old kit but still comparatively high end QUAD 33/303 feeding QUAD ESL-57 electrostaticspeakers)
My turntable was fed to an ARTcessories phono pre-amp which in turn fed an Edirol UA-1EX external USB soundcard and this into a USB port on my PC (I did start out with a cheapy USB turntable but the sound quality was rubbish).
I recorded with Audacity set with its default quality settings of 32-bit float, 44.1 kHz - the Edirol soundcard worked at 16-bit.
I did very little post-processing apart from claening the track ends and beginnings and the inter-track gaps. I started out processing the clicks and pops by hand and that was very time consuming - but after a steer from Koz I started using ClickRepair, that saved me loads of time and produced excellent results - see this sticky thread: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/click-pop-removal-clickrepair-software/1933/1
I exported a 32-bit WAV file from Audacity immediately after capture and processed that file through ClickRepair to produce a cleaned 32-bit WAV file which I imported back into Audacity for further processing and export.
When I exported I used the default settings of 16-bit PCM stereo WAV - I used triangular dither setting at the time but now I would recommend shaped dither (which I think is the default).
My workflow got encapsulated in this tutorial which I wrote a while back with considerable insight from other skilled users: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/sample_workflow_for_lp_digitization.html
So the upshot: what I managed to produce were some really excellent results which sounded as good as listening to the vinyl through my hi-fi rig - and in many cases better (beacuse the clicks and pops were removed).
WC