And by the way... I do record some of my vinyls to the PC, and when playing back the digital recording, it sounds just like the vinyl... in other words, the difference is not in my source... my digital recording of my vinyl still sounds vastly different than the digital version from Tidal etc.
After reading all five pages and seeing the ebb and flow of the discussion, I see two problems with your post. The first was you put the words "digital" and "CD" and "vinyl" in the same post and it instantly causes people (the collective here, not any particular individual) to melt down (shorthand for cognitive bias overload). The terms pop out
DIGITAL and
VINYL and they don't read to the end to see what it is you are asking and post about another digital vs. vinyl thread. I think you spend the first two pages, at least, trying to clarify what the point of your thread was.
The second problem I see is that in a room full of objectivists, the partial quotation above causes a meltdown in another direction because your premise (as stated) is faulty. You did receive one response that addressed this head-on, but only one such response (which led me to the conclusion that most quit reading after they saw "digital" and "vinyl" within 10 words of one another). Your vinyl signal is going through a different signal path than your digital signal. You have to factor that out, and recording the
output of your vinyl playback isn't going to get you there. Assuming your recording technique isn't adding, or subtracting, anything audible, whatever changes have been made by your RIAA EQ circuit and your phono preamp circuit. (Your digital playback is also going to change things, and could be making your digital playback inferior because of the D/A converter, whatever decoding/processing might be going on (DSD, PCM, etc.) that is making everything digital sound horrible. This is doubtful, and so I'm just setting it completely to the side). So you got yourself in the trap of "how do you know what you are hearing is the ________ vs. the _____________." This is a problem you need to figure out because based on that quotation, what you are hearing in terms of a difference, should not be uniform (vastly different).
There are two many variables involved in the recording, mixing, and especially the mastering process, and the mass production process for all vinyl as compared to the same digital source to all sound "vastly different." So, as you know, that means that statistically the most likely reason the difference is your signal chain. Maybe you have the best vinyl rig on earth, playing 45 RPM audiophile reissues and your digital playback is Tidal on your eyephone and you are Bluetoothing that to the worst SINAD-rated amplifier. Or the other way around, you have the best digital playback on earth, your stylus how ground down to almost nothing and your brain is telling you that's the best sound on earth. Who knows?
Now, assuming you can get the playback issue factored out (I would delete the whole paragraph about the level-matching, and recording entirely, but that's just me); and assuming you really would like to know what is going on in the mastering that might account for what you are hearing (good, bad or indifferent) - well I think you are still going to be out of luck. The collective, at least with those who chose to post in this thread, do not understand the difference between recording, mixing and mastering as they use those terms interchangeably at times. They don't understand what a "master" is, or what a "master tape" is, which is the case of most audio enthusiasts because they keep seeing the word in many contexts from a marketing perspective - "digitally remastered" or "mastered from the original master tapes" etc. In this thread, I recall several instances of something being referred to as a "digital master" or an "analog master" or a "master." People that live, work and breath in the recording process domain don't use those kinds of terms except maybe internally when it has a specific meaning to that specific organization. People in that domain, that understand the variables that might account for what you are hearing world use terms like: "session tapes" or "mixdown tape" or "Eq master tape" or "mix down file" or "studio master file."
They will throw some objective data/science your way, S/N this, channel separation that, but it's not going to answer your question because it's not the focus of the Forum, and it isn't the domain of the average/typical member here. This thread is a perfect example of that. Once you figure out how to ask the right questions (and you can leave vinyl out of the conversation entirely to avoid that debate) you can get to the root of why something that starts out as the original source (could be the first generation 2 track mixdown tape, or the first generation 2 track digital file) ends up being changed after it goes through digital audio mastering and then changed again when it is sent off for mass production into physical media (CD, DVD, Bluray) during glass/photo/DRAW mastering. These real issues that exist, that degrade and distort the sound in the digital domain are dealt with by the upper echelon of mastering engineers every day don't really exist here (except loudness wars, DR ratings).
I will post a video of a top-tier mastering engineer who is talking with a record store owner who is not very versed in the technical (which is good, because Bernie explains why the interviewer's assumption that DSD is superior is misplaced, there are significant drawbacks). If you take the time to watch it, I think it will answer a great deal of what you are trying to get at, by someone who really knows what they are talking about when it comes to digital mastering and what the changes can be.