Vinyl does indeed wear out.
But I am not sure recording it to standard CD wav format really is better. It’s only 23KHZ, I know, people will say that unless you’re some kind of bat you can’t hear the difference, but I swear it sounds different to me!!
I kbow for a while back in the 80’s I transferred a bunch of CD’s to R2R (I had a nice Sony R2R that would go to 7 1/2 ips) and playing it back from tape sounded better than the original CD’s!
Most adults can't hear sounds above 15 kHz. But even if they do, the CD format encodes and decodes up to 20 kHz just fine, because it's pure math. The vinyl physically can't record much of high frequency signals - the link to hydrogenaudio that I provided has some words on that subject:
"Additionally, during playback, the turntable's stylus has limits on what grooves it can successfully track. Cartridges can only track grooves of a finite modulation width (measured in microns) that decreases in frequency. For instance, a cartridge may only be able to track a 300um-wide groove at 300hz, and yet only 50um at 20khz. This also places limits on the acceleration and velocity limits the record master can take."
So the difference that you are hearing is basically an equalizer that had been applied to the master signal before recording. Your experience with CD to tape transfer seems to confirm that, because the tape has its own problems.
A modern digital system (not necessarily a CD) will reproduce with great accuracy what you feed into it. So if you feed your vinyl into a modern 24-bit ADC, with oversampling and such, and then play it back you should get exactly the original vinyl sound. There would be simply no technical reason for it to be different. You can try and see what happens.