I am not a sound engineer, so my understanding of the subject matter is extremely naive. But I am getting mighty confused with, what to me seems like a regular conflation between terms 'distortion' and 'EQ'. I would appreciate it if someone could set me straight in these matters.

We often hear how vinyl reproduction adds certain characteristic distortion which then contributes to our assessment that vinyl somehow sounds different than digital reproduction. But my question is: is it distortion, or is it EQ that the turntable appears to be adding to the original signal?

Let me put it this way: I'm a musician, and I like to overdub myself in my home studio. I track myself playing, and then I edit the tracks in Protools. What I often end up doing is messing a bit with the EQ, increasing some frequencies, reducing some other frequencies a bit, etc. So am I actually adding distortion to the original signal? I may not like how the microphone was tracking my instrument, or my voice, so I need to edit it. But as the author, I don't see it as adding distortion to the signal. I see it as polishing the recording so that it sounds the way I like it.

So is a turntable then doing the same thing? Is it polishing the original signal to make it sound more appealing to us? And of course, the better the turntable/plater/tonearm/cartridge/phono/interconnects combo is, the more pleasing, the more satisfying this EQ-ing appears. But why do we then refer to it as 'distortion'?