Stephen Goodman wrote:

Does anyone have any opinions/facts on what level of WMA or MP3
resolution it is worth ripping/storing music to which has come
from LP by way of cassettes (Dolby B/C, and a decent cassette deck
.. even a decent turntable and pre-amp .. but even so, I guess
using the 160kbit/sec WMA format that I usually use for CD ripping
is probably a waste of time, space, and money).

IMHO, anything less than 320kbps is a waste of time. Disk space is
so cheap these days that the audible loss of quality with (say)
128/160/192kbps isn't worth putting up with. Imagine in 5 years
time when computers routinely have terabytes of disk space as
standard, it'll seem ridiculous to have to put up with inferior
quality rips for the sake of saving some disk space.

Admittedly I'd struggle to tell the difference between a 256kbps
rip and the original but, for the sake of the future, I only rip at
320.

That's probably true for CD/DVD rips, but this stuff is coming from
vinyl by way of audio cassette, and I suspect that even 256kbs is
massive overkill??

Not necessarily. If you can make as 'perfect' a remaster as possible
from the audio cassette, for instance, you'll also be getting all the
noise that is inherent in audio cassettes. To restate the "for the
sake of the future", it makes sense to make as good a remaster from a
perishable (or perishing!) medium for more than playback sake. Think
of the improved noise-removal software that will come along as a
matter of course. A higher-resolution copy from the cassette will be
most likely easier to clean up than a lesser one (which by way of
compression would most likely have its own sonic artifacts that
weren't ever part of the music).

To be honest, if this is going to be a 'one of a kind' master copy that can
never be recreated - don't use MP3!! Master it as a raw WAV file and
compress with a lossless compression format (flac or ape) so that you can
always get back to the original master quality. That way, when a better
quaility format comes along, you haven't hamstrung yourself and
irretrievably lost something from the recording. I use flac for my
one-of-a-kind masters...