Just to chime in. I'm currently having some some success with using an Edirol R-44 standalone digital recorder combined with a Sony EP9ES to get bit perfect Dolby Digital and PCM rips from Laserdiscs.

The Edirol has a coax digital input, which it can capture bit perfectly at 44.1 and 48khz.

The Sony EP9ES is a standalone Dolby Digital decoder, which also has an AC-3 RF input (for Laserdiscs), and an optical digital pass-thru output, which with the addition of a 10 dollar optical to coax converter can be hooked into the R-44.

It's simple to slot in an 16GB SDHC card, and just load laserdiscs one after the other into the player, and leave it running while I do something else on the computer.

The R-44 isn't cheap, but is endlessly useful for other things, and the EP9ES is actually cheap on ebay compared to a simple laserdisc demodulator.

AC3 is easy to split out of the .wav using Besplit.

Anyone else have any technical 'recipes' to share ?