Really surprised they left out those details. Needles have a huge impact on the frequency curve, a lot of standard club needles are bass heavy and/or sacrifice fidelity for tracking.
And on the digital side the ADC makes a noticeable difference. Plus is it isolated from the other circuitry, particularly power supplies?
Ripping vinyl takes enough work, it's worth knowing the few details that make the effort worthwhile.
As bondaburrah points out in the sibling comment, there are probably no consumer sound cards in existence that would be able to record a non-preamplified vinyl recording. So the RIAA equalisation issue is moot.
Yes, there are. Any sound card that supports XLR connector mics will probably support phantom power and have a built-in mic amp, a vinyl pre-amp is not much different. I use an E-MU 1212m with a microdock, making it equivalent to a 1616m, which offers a "Turntable Input (w/ground lug and hardware RIAA preamp)".
Interesting. I had no idea how cheap what I would consider to be pro-grade sound cards are. I'd have thought an XLR input soundcard with phantom power support was close to $1000.
Well, any card with mic pres can do it, including a lot of older SoundBlaster type cards. I wouldn't recommend mucking around with doing things that way, but it could be done.
Most people rip vinyl using a hardware phono stage (which is a preamp + RIAA eq), but there are some audiophiles who prefer to rip using a straight mic pre, which bumps the levels up without applying any eq, and then applying suitable eq in software.
In theory, this would let you play around with different variants of the eq curve, and it would mean not needing a phono stage but only a (cheaper) mic preamp. In practice, most people who rip vinyl are going to have a phono stage anyway, because they want to listen in addition to rip, and there's just not that much benefit of doing it in software vs. using a cheap-but-decent analog phono stage, so few people do.
The exception seems to be people who are into early 78s, which often have proprietary eq curves.
I would guess that the Audacity people assume that people would be using a turntable plugged into a preamplifier with RIAA equilisation built in.
http://midimagic.sgc-hosting.com/mixphono.htm
History before the 1950s is complex. Audacity has provision for defining a frequency response curve and applying that curve to a project.