If you look at the history of analogue, it’s a steady progress of greater refinement, additional precision and increased complexity.
If you look at digital, it’s going in the same direction. If you believe that digital can’t be improved beyond a bit-perfect file, that’s fine. But that belief will also hold back discoveries of just how damned good digital and specifically streamed digital can become by removing noise, timing errors and vibration from the entire chain.
I agree that the file is only bit perfect because it is data, and once it is 'read' the digital stream becomes 'frail'.
This was taken from "There's no Such Thing as Digital: a Conversation With Charles Hansen, Gordon Rankin, and Steve Silberman" by Michael Lavorgna, AudioStream June 24, 2013:
Michael Lavorgna: It's common for people to envision and represent a digital signal as a series of 1s and 0s. As such, there's really no room for error, at least according to this binary theory. Is a digital signal simply a series of 1s and 0s?
Charlie Hansen: Unfortunately not. The "1"s and "0"s are just abstractions that are easy to think about. But in the real world, something real needs to represent those two abstract states. In modern digital electronics, we have almost universally chosen a voltage above a specific level (that varies from one "family" of electronic parts to another) to represent a "1" and a voltage below a different specific level (that again can vary) to represent a "0".
In the real world, those two voltages are not the same, so there is a "grey" zone between the "black" of the "0" and the "white" of the "1". Also, it takes time for the signal to change levels, and the time required to do so can depend on dozens (or even thousands) of other external factors.
All of the problems with digital are analog problems.
I disagree with your vinyl player analogy only because the moajority of people were/are addressing real problems whilst in digital audio a few people are addressing imagined problems (mostly for lack of understanding).
Driving a Lamborghini to the supermarket will make as much difference to the time it takes as using a fancy clock in a network switch will improve the data transfer.