Well, there's nothing terribly old-school about cassette tapes (old school = reels! ha!) but it does feel like it sometimes.
I'm close to the end of the grand project. My journey led me to a Sony KA3ES, then a Nakamichi DR1, then a Nakamichi Dragon and a Nakamichi CR-7A, as well as a Sony WM-D6C portable. I think I have more state-of-the-art cassette equipment than anyone in this part of metro Detroit
I ended up settling on standard 96/24 stereo PCM for my encoding format. It's expensive on disk space, but at this point disk space is becoming pretty cheap. I also found that it's possible to burn 96/24 PCM to DVD-R and playback at full resolution on some players. So, I feel I have some semi-future-proof physical storage format at least for a few years, although I'm keeping this stuff on a pair of separate hard drives just for safety's sake.
I enabled NR where I had strong suspicions that the original tape was recorded with it. I chose to do this due to the phenomenal NR job that the dragon does - it removed the hiss and maintained the signal better than *any* plug-in I tried. (And I tried many.) It's possible that the tables will turn in a few years, but for now, no regrets.
The Nakamichi Dragon is everything it's said to be, and more. The sound quality meets or beats anything else I've heard, and while the CR-7 had some slick[er] moves, the Dragon simply feels like the better playback device. On a couple of occasions, I play CDs made from digitized tapes and nobody notices. I fully recommend it if you can get your hands on a model that works well, and I got very lucky in this regard. I realize there's some risk here. By the way, the DR1 is a very good substitute.. you still get that playback azimuth adjustment.
The 1212m is a recording sound card to match the Dragon, however it's a royal pain for day-to-day use. I can't wait to wrap this up so that I can sell it and go back to on-board toslink to my receiver
As an aside, I ended up doing pretty hi-rez scans (3200dpi optical!) of the tapes and inserts (where there was something on them) and store them along with the .wav files for each side.
I'm gambling that in five years, managing about 300GB of digitized audio will be easy as pie, so I'm grabbing what I can now, and not bothering to do any noise reduction or clean-up. I'll save that for the audio tools and compute power of the future.