The reason I find digital intermasters for LPs absurd is that the source will always be less distorted than the vinyl pressing. And I'm not going to buy into "euphonic distortion" as an excuse for making the media that much easier to damage or more likely to have pitch & noise issues. This is 2019, not 1969.
Oh, I get where you are coming from!
There is, from a certain approach, a way in which it is absurd.
If one takes the approach of "I'm in to vinyl because I think analog is superior sound to digital," then some absurdity arises, ESPECIALLY for expensive turntables like the one in the review. After all, what are all these over-built turntables supposed to be doing anyway? The selling point is virtually always that they have found ways of REDUCING DISTORTION (all the heavy platters, damping, precision in the tone arm, tracking, etc, all have that implicit or explicit goal of avoiding added distortion.
Well, if reducing distortion is the goal, which presumably is also about hearing the source with as little distortion as possible, then this makes little sense with LPs coming from a digital master. The whole process of transferring the digital source to vinyl, inherently adding distortion, and going through heroic efforts and expense to reduce that distortion in the turntable playback seems silly. Just skip all that distortion-adding nonsense and play the digital file!
Makes perfect sense, given that way of thinking.
The thing is, the reasons people play vinyl happen to be more wider-ranging than that way of thinking. E.g., all the things people like about the physical character of vinyl LPs and turntables. And it's completely legitimate for anyone to prefer a certain type of added distortion, if in fact they do.
In my case, as I've written before, I'm amazed how close vinyl playback can actually come to digital playback, given a good source/pressing.
But even so, there is always going to be some level of distortion picked up in the process, and I often enjoy it. So my goal in buying a "better" turntable that reduces distortion wasn't to reach the perfection of digital of course. Rather, it was to minimize the type of distortion that can make vinyl unpleasant for me, while retaining the sound/distortions that I find pleasant. My current set up does that almost perfectly for my tastes. Many LPs can sound simply astounding. I was playing a recently purchased album and the sound, evaluated on it's own, was almost ideal to my ears: rich, warm, punchy, super clean and clear, lively...it had every characteristic that makes me luxuriate in the sound as well as the musical performance. And the whole process of owning and playing the LP is more pleasurable than playing a CD or flicking through songs on my phone app. It just makes for a richer overall experience to me.
But...if you have the goal I indicated earlier, more narrowly defined as wanting to hear the original digital source as undistorted as possible, then you'd of course have a different reaction than I do.