[Kadin]

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.