There are cases where it sounds better though. Not because the music on vinyl, but because they did a different master for the vinyl release that's not as brick walled as the digital release.

Honestly, have you looked at your sound system recently?

At the time of vinyl, the RIAA had standards on how to process the sound. Those were good standards. On the move to digital we threw them away, and nowadays some companies go into the cheapest route, some go into the best benchmarks route, and nearly no company tries to release a system that sounds good anymore.

But vinyl systems still have to follow the RIAA standards, otherwise they'll get completely distorted.

This is quite possibly the first post I have ever read on the internet that mentioned the RIAA with a positive tone.

For others, here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

I was very surprised when I discovered it :)

Looks like they used to develop all kinds of tech for sound record and playback.

They threw them out because they’re just there to compensate for specific distortion in the analog vinyl medium. As far as I understand the riaa equalization in your phonograph is just to undo the premphasis put there when it was mastered. It’s completely unneeded in digital audio.

It doesn't automatically sound better. But the main reduction in quality from most digital storage comes from sacrifices made in encoding/compression to achieve more efficient storage.

Since you simply cannot do this on analog storage, vinyl will not have these compromises and will usually sound better.

But compared to good lossless digital storage that makes the opposite sacrifice (ie: Take up more space to retain more quality) vinyl will almost always produce a less accurate reproduction due to the physical properties (degradation) of the record itself.

Though many people seem to find these analog losses appealing or 'warmer' and actually prefer it to a more accurate reproduction of the original master.

Of course vinyl has the same issues. How close are your groves? How rigid is your material? If you spin it faster you can het higher frequencies but then the needle has more chance to grind down those physical grooves each time you play it.

Uncompressed digital audio is going to sound equal to or (more likely) better, and it doesn’t have the degradation problem.

That is completely true, I hadn't really thought about that.