Re: Digital transmission?
This is a very nuanced area.
I have 45 year old vinyl that has been kept reasonably well, and it still plays fantastic.
My HiFi is fairly vintage, and all pretty budget (but good budget), although components and parts have been replaced over the years.
The turntable started life as a Pro-Ject Debut II in about 2001, but has had a new motor suspension which seriously reduced the rumble (made it almost inalienable at normal volumes), has had the arm from a Debut III fitted, and the cartridge replaced with my vintage Ortofon VMS20E cartridge (unfortunately using a quality aftermarket stylus, as the original is no longer made). The most recent change was replacing the heavy rubber mat I used with 6mm of acrylic disk, which has made a huge difference to the accuracy of the bass.
For CD, I used to use a Technics CD changer, and at that time, I felt that vinyl copies of the same album were clearer than the CD. But I discovered two things. When I replaced the CD player with a vintage Marantz one, with a Cambridge Audio external DAC, the sound playback from the CDs jumped in quality using the external DAC, even compared to the built-in DAC of the Marantz. The other thing is that modern CD pressings, especially 'remastered' ones often sound terrible compared to the vintage CD pressings. And many modern albums sound really bad as well, mainly because the levels are set so high that sometimes they clip, and they rarely use the full, much greater dynamic range of CD (everything is loud, nothing is quiet).
Yes. Vinyl is a flawed medium. Yes the quality of the turntable is important, and the cartridge and stylus even more so (finer stylii sit more deeply in the grove, and are more immune to surface scratches, but suffer from debris in the bottom of the grove more). Yes, badly kept vinyl suffers from dirt and damage. Yes the dynamic range of vinyl is lower than CD. Yes, there is distortion caused by the non-linear path of pivoted tone arms. Yes the tracking speed of vinyl changes from the outer to the inner groves.
But even given all of this, vinyl can still sound superb, and many respected brand CD players can mangle the music, and modern audio engineering and production can misuse the supposed better capabilities of CD just as badly.
BTW. I bought one of the cheap (£89) Dual manual turntables from Lidl a while back, just to see what it was like (it's not the Dual of old, however, merely a badged Chinese TT, which is available under several names), and I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of playback,especially when the felt mat was replaced by my heavy rubber one. The original cartridge was quite good (an Audio Technica AT3600L which has had very good reviews for a rock-bottom budget cartridge) but also takes better cartridges quite well as well. Only the poor initial set-up of the arm and the built-in phono pre-amp let it down. Turning the pre-amp off, and feeding it into the phono input of my NAD amp cured nearly all of the problems from the pre-amp. This shows that there is still a cheap way into vinyl.