Hang around or read in the turntables forum. A BIG piece of the vinyl playback business is associated with the cartridge and stylus. The importance of the first transducer to touch the record surface can't be overstated. Whatever system you are using to transcribe or rip from vinyl will require knowledge of vinyl playback.
A few of the intricacies are things like matching the cartridge electrical loading from your phono stage to the requirements for the cartridge. If your systems are using say Audio Technica cartridges, your standard 47K is quite acceptable. But, if the cartridge is different, it may pose an issue.
Also, the stylus is very important. A lot of folks do not know how much music they are leaving on the table by using a poor or mediocre stylus. I'm not suggesting that you'all go out and get a Fritz-Gieger stylus or anything. But look at the system and see what it will support for reasonable $$ and invest a bit there.
The work that you will be doing to get the information off the vinyl is not trivial. No point in making it less valuable and less pleasing just because you are running a mediocre stylus or something.
Also, you can benefit from having a coupe of styli on hand. Say a line contact, an elliptical, and maybe even a conical that will all fit your cartridge body. There are modern conicals on carbon fiber cantilevers that will do an excellent job on some Rock and Roll pressings from back in the day. You can swap them to get around record wear patterns and such so that you get the best signal possible w/o having to re-align the cartridge and rebalanced the arm, etc.
Up to a point it is a mechanical system. Like all mechanical systems it can benefit from thoughtful tuning and handling. Make sure the LPs are as clean as you can get them. If all this stuff is working well, you can expect to get very good results and maybe better than what's out there in the commercial CD market, given their propensity to over compress and over amp the signal on modern CDs
