First, Peter, this is about what you said, cause it is said a lot, and this is something that you might look at a different way, not to change your pleasure of LP or tape or am radio or mp3 or fm radio or digital or whatever turns you on.
Here is an example of the amount of losses a signal may go through in the LP process (from Don's post answering Myles), and let me tell you, the final cutter puts its sonic fingerprint on the sound in a big way. Lets talk several percent IM distortion here alone.
There's 5 minimum, sometimes 7.
1: Tape to lacquer
2: Lacquer to matrix
3: Matrix to mother
4: Mother to stamper
5: Stamper to vinyl
If a large release is anticipated, copy mothers are made from some of the stampers before they are used.
5: Stamper to copy mother
6: Copy mother to stamper
7: Stamper to vinyl
Degradation occurs at each step.
Now, when one prefers this (and I like LP too, and digital, and I KNOW its the mix/master and the vinyl process distortions) sound of vinyl, and uses terms like more body and flesh and all that good stuff, well, that's all that added distortions that are actually "filling in extra information" to a rather anemic plain old stereo system and of course your ears are pleased, and don't forget you did choose your playback cartridge cause it sounds good to you! So, just saying, that there is no doubt that vinyl is "adding" a lot of easy to measure distortions and there is no doubt that the same measuring gear does certainly not see these distortions at these levels in digital.
Take away, yes, vinyl is more distorted than digital. or, one person prefers vinyls distortions to digitals distortions.!
Honestly, your vinyl playback system does not retrieve more detail from the source (as explained above, and infact your TT adds a huge amount of IMD and high frequency energy...which can sound good of course) but it is true that digital does distort more in its basic form (forget using noise shaping and dither) than analog for low level signals, but both end up in the noise pretty well below what we can hear when playing at a decent volume anyway, IMO.
and, digital is a storage medium, and vinyl and tape are storage mediums, and putting info in and taking it out are distortion analog steps in all storage systems. its important to keep that clear in these debates as well.
on topic of this thread, I think every music lover should hear vinyl, as it is another expression of the recording arts, and they might prefer it, as many do.