I can attribute my hearing loss to years of jets on flightlines and listening to Cold War enemies on headsets. However, the OP wants advice on converting LP’s to digital. If you can manage the attachment of a turntable to a computer, you can use Audacity (or other software) to digitize the output. Now for the controversial statements: Convert as WAV, not MP3! A wav file is uncompressed, lossless and provides a digital sound quality equal to the analog. An mp3 file is a greatly compressed and lossy version of the music. Sort of like the difference between a RAW file and a basic JPG. WAV files can be 20 times the the size of an mp3 file, but storage is cheap these days. If you are a critical listener, you will be disappointed by the sound of an mp3 cut. The very best compromise is to record as a WAV file and then convert to a lossless format, such as FLAC. That way you retain a perfect copy of the original, uncompressed, with no loss to sound quality. Flac files are much smaller than WAV files, but preserve the sound that’s captured. You can always convert to mp3 later to load on your smartphone or other mobile device. Once converted to flac the WAV file can be deleted. The flac file can be converted to mp3. I have 47,000 songs on a hard drive, most of them in flac format.

Stories of list records are all over the place, but here is the actual loss by category, date, etc.

On July 12, 1973, a disastrous fire at the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) destroyed approximately 16-18 million Official Military Personnel Files (OMPF). The records affected:

Personnel and Period Affected

Estimated Loss

Army Personnel discharged November 1, 1912 to January 1, 1960 80%

Air Force Personnel discharged September 25, 1947 to January 1, 1964 (with names alphabetically after Hubbard, James E.) 75%

https://www.archives.gov/personnel-records-center/fire-1973

Boy, that brings back memories. I bought a Sansui 5000 receiver, a Dual 1019 turntable and a pair of AR speakers at the PX at Freedom Hill (DaNang), and shipped them home when my tour was up. Like a lot of us, I’m nearly deaf in my right ear - there were no hearing protectors in the jungle or in a fire fight. Several decades later, I bought a pair of the original KOSS ESP Electrostatic headphones which came with an individual calibration chart for each ear speaker. They are heavy (and were expensive), but to this day, they are the best reference transducers I have ever heard.