is the sound of vinyl due to the physical process of the turntable?

Geoffkait,
I agree!
The information is on the silver disc, extracting it is the issue. I recently sold my 47 Labs 4735 CD player with their non over sampling, non filtering dac. It was a great CD player and produced an impressive musicality but still fell short of my analog rig. I sold it to buy a better cartridge which will increase that delta. Some say the AN UK DAC 5 makes redbook sound like good analog. But then its a little pricey. I think the argument though is that digital renders a discontinuous sampled playback that our perception stitches together and it never quite gets there, for me. 
The argument against analog is pops and clicks, artifacts of crappy analog. We could no doubt agree that crappy is crappy be it digital or analog.
Other issue..... A microphone or cartridge are examples of electromagnetic transducers. They convert vibration into electrical signal. This signal in its unaltered form is a near if not perfect analog of the source. I guess that begs the question of is digital not also a near if not perfect analog of the source within its own context.
hmmm, maybe so.

Im old, I like records.

guitarsam-

Sam here again, i'm not sure if the sound I like from vintage vinyl is the hardware creating the stereo effect I hear or is it present on the master tape? And if it is present how come I don't hear it on the digital album. 

I did discover this and it may just be the placebo effect however i think it sounds more vinyl like with that stereoness i hear with 1970's vinyl. i'm running digital audio through this filter with all the effects turned off.

You keep saying you like the sound of vintage vinyl. But for a guy who likes the sound of vintage vinyl you sure seem to spend a lot of time messing around with digital. In spite of what you say it seems what you really like is fooling around with digital files, trying to make them sound like vintage vinyl.  

If you really do like vintage vinyl why not just listen to vintage vinyl? Why try and put legs on a snake?

And if your answer is, to be able to make modern recordings sound as good as vintage vinyl, well then good luck. Better men than you have devoted whole careers trying to make digital sound as good as analog. So good luck with that!

Same here and by giving up and going vinyl I will not have the answer which I believe will be found by stepping outside the box + I believe that new remastered vinyl is fake vinyl and to my ears does not have that stereos I hear from 1st press vinyl. This is a conspiracy to destroy the healing effects of real audio and the Hypersonic effect

is the sound of vinyl due to the physical process of the turntable?

@guitarsam - not due to, in spite of. From a noise perspective, turntables only contribute to the noise floor. What a better (but not necessarily expensive) turntable provides is less background noise.

The sound of vinyl is due to the process of the stylus being dragged through the grooves and mechanical energy being transferred to low-level electrical energy. The cartridge/tonearm/wiring/phono stage/preamp  symbiosis AND turntable noise floor is responsible for our tail wagging response. All other things being equal

I think another aspect is that, as I understand it, digital and vinyl are mastered differently, so of course they will sound different.

The mathematician in me can understand the theory of digital, and some of the higher sampling rates should theoretically continue to come closer and closer to vinyl, but the emotion in me understands that it just isn't the same.

One other often overlooked difference, with vinyl people would usually listen to an entire side of a record, with digital they are skipping only between "great songs," yet to me they're still missing out on the "esoteric-ness" of what vinyl is.