system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
Well, my best friend is a sound engineer.

Basically, music exists as a series of waves. You combine all the waves together, you have music.

Computers can't really store a wave. They just express it as a series of discrete numbers when it's actually a continuous function.

So an MP3 is like a jpeg, while a vinyl record is like a photograph.

The thing is... well... you've seen jpegs. Some of them look absolutely identical to photographs. There's no way on Earth you could tell the difference.

It's kind of the same with vinyl. Vinyl is the only way you can get the "true" sound of the music, and some people want to say "Yeah. I can tell the difference." But... also, they're liars. The "pixels" that make up an MP3 are so small that no human being could ever possibly tell the difference.
gpt
Yes you’re correct that mp3 will sound worse, but .wav (lossless audio) sounds loads better than vinyl, and is way more convenient. So vinyl vs digital is not really about the sound quality at all. Most people listen to vinyl for the physical experience and the nostalgia, not the audio quality. In fact vinyl sounds worse than .wav due to the physical limitations of cutting the record, 44.1khz by definition can recreate every sound perceptible to the human ear perfectly.