Recording old 78's with Audacity + LP12

I would be extremely wary of playing 78s with a fine hifi stylus. Some moving magnet cartridges used to have an option of a swap-in fat stylus for 78s (Shure in particular used to do this). Otherwise:

When I inherited a couple of 78s of my grandfather singing, several years after selling my TT, bought an Ion TT with USB output through eBay for something like £20-30. It claimed to play 78s but didn’t have 78 speed, and I don’t recall if a separate stylus (if not I would have reasoned it would have been a robust spherical not elliptical so not worried about damaging the stylus). The Ion is clearly not hifi - but then neither were wind-up gramophones with steel needles… And whilst the geometry and playing characteristics of the Ion would differ from that of an old gramophone, any artefacts from such play are probably far less significant than the quality limitations of said old gramophone.

I fed it into my laptop and used Audacity to adjust speed, and also to clean up substantially, and apply some tone correction to make it sound as best I could. It is too long ago to remember all details: I’m guessing the Ion RIAA corrected, which of course is not applicable - I don’t recall whether Audacity may have corrected for inappropriate RIAA correction, but I recall playing tweaking a bit myself beyond whatever Audacity did. Once happy I burnt to multiple CDs, made a nice label, and distributed to all family members. (Everyone was pleasantly surprised to receive it, and several commented it sounded surprisingly good for the ancient 78s they were.) I then sold the Ion TT for about what I had paid - and have the original 78s sealed up and stored safely.