Comment by bayindirh

There's digital and there's digital. If you look at some of the technology used for A/D and D/A conversion, it's possible to do it lossless way. I learnt this after I started recording my bass and this is a very deep rabbit hole.

If they are using well refined conversion paths with enough bit depth, that buffer stage will be completely invisible even at the waveform level.

As a person who likes, buys and listens vinyl, I don't care how it's processed to that stage as long as it sounds fine. Note that I don't buy vinyl because of the "sound quality per se", but for the experience of listening it. I like to make time to listen my favorite albums properly, and vinyl is a part of that for some albums. I'm equally fine with audio from a CD or a well encoded lossy codec. I can distinguish between lossy and lossless encoding of the same album, but I don't always have time to appreciate that.

So, some references (This guy has enough knowledge to write his own DSP plugins):

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuecg-5Gvn8

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-MGXDXR4x0

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fmCy686IC8