Digitizing Vinyl Records with Audacity

>Another thing to note is that if you're connecting your turntable directly >to the computer (rather than through a preamp), you should apply the RIAA >preamp filter in Audacity.
Be careful here, the phono preamp not only does the RIAA equalization,
it also has a ton of gain to bring the tiny magnetic pickup levels
up to "line level". Connecting the phono pickup directly to a sound
card would probably result in a very low level recording with a lot of
hiss. I would not use the higher gain "mic" inputs on most sound cards
either, they tend to be noisy and most of them are mono-only.
An outboard preamp produces the best results.