Didn't Adobe Audition get a bad review recently for its restoration stuff; in particular its denoising component? Maybe that was here in this forum on one of the audio restoration topics vs. in a magazine. At any rate, whatever gets the job done for someone and makes their clients happy is alright for them, so I only mention this to encourage anyone considering it to read up on it a bit before assuming it's also a good solution for them. Overall though Audition looks like a well-designed product, and the new version may be worlds apart from previous versions based on some early reports.
That's great that the Denon accepts 78's. I can't remember if my Stanton does or not. I foolishly sold a Rega glass turntable before moving to California in late 1991, thinking there were so many earthquakes here that I couldn't play records
. After many years of waiting for more obscure stuff to NOT come out on CD, I gave up and bought the Stanton turntable a few years ago. It's actually pretty good quality considering it isn't audiophile, so I guess the DJ's are a more demanding lot than typical consumers.
My parents have a large collection of 78's, all of them classical, and by now most available on CD. To me that was one of the very few bonuses of the switch from vinyl to CD, that there was an initial rush to release a lot of long out of print classical stuff. In some cases I'm not just talking about performances (like Pablo Casals) but composers (such as Darius Milhaud and Nikolai Medtner) for whom there were no other recordings.
It is unfortunate though that 16 rpm records do not seem to be covered by many modern turntables. This was the speed of choice for spoken word recordings, and I'm not sure how many of those have been released on CD. My family has a bunch of those back east as well, and I had hoped to eventually do some transfers and restoration work on them.
There are some obscure formats that didn't live long and that I only learned about at the AES Show in San Francisco last October. Some of these came between the spindles, acetate, early 78's, etc. and later vinyl. Ever since then, I've wondered if there are only one or two restoration houses in the world that cover those formats (that have the appropriate playback hardware, for instance).
As for finding stuff on 78's, some of the more obscure formats, etc., while visiting family this spring near Boston, my brother and I headed up to Salem MA, Rockport, and Gloucester, and in Gloucester discovered an amazing record store that used to be in Cambridge and a few other locations, called "Mystery Train", which is two floors high and has just about every 78, 45-box-set, 10" vinyl LP at 33-1/2, reel-to-reel-tape, 8-track tape, etc., that I ever saw or owned as a child, along with other formats so bizarre that I don't quite remember what they were. Unfortunately they told me that they couldn't afford the rent anymore and were going to consolidate onto a single floor and start doing the more obscure formats strictly as an on-line service on eBay.
I just got back from visiting my alma mater in Bloomington IN and was surprised to find three or four mostly-vinyl record stores downtown, also with many recordings that are otherwise unavailable. These were not DJ-oriented stores like most of the vinyl shops in larger metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Fransicsco.
Meanwhile, my brother forwarded me an article yesterday about how vinyl is making a comeback and will likely outlive CD's (as distinguished from other delivery mechanisms for digital audio). Unfortunately I don't have that link at hand. It is pointed out that vinyl does not support as much compression as CD's and so simultaneous releases these days tend to me more dynamic on vinyl than on CD where the Loudness Wars prevail.
I suspect that most people interested in restoration are focused primarily on material that simply isn;t available elsewise, as it is time-consuming to do the transfers and most would rather just spend $10 to buy the CD vs. trying to save money by transferring their own vinyl. With that in mind, I am also wondering if there is any independent organisation supportive of paying the proper royalties and making one's transfers available to others, since the labels themselves aren't doing it and in many cases may no longer exist (even if absorbed by larger corporations over time).