Burned CDs can sound better than the original?

I guess this is the opposite theory to the one that says CDRs sound worse for one of a variety of reasons. I've never been able to get any sort of engineering reasoning as to why either would be the case. Given that it's easy to show that you have an identical copy of the original on the CDR (becuase, obviously, if you don't all bets are off), it's been hypothesized that CDRs sound worse because it's harder to read them reliably.

To give you the best answer to your question that I have, if you copied a CD that wasn't pristine to a CDR that is, you might be able to get an identical copy since the burner can retry reading the CD until it reads it successfully, whereas the CD player can't. Hence, the pristine CDR reads perfectly by the CD player for playback, while the original does not, and therefore sounds slightly better. I would think this wouldn't occur in the vast majority of cases, especially with most audiophiles' well kept CD collections. -Kirk

One way: I run my CAL Icon Mk2 CD player through a TDS Harmonic Recovery System before the preamp. In burning a CD, I can choose digital direct cable connection (CD player to burner) or analogue cable connection (CD player to HRS to preamp to burner). For a CD that is not particularly well recorded or produced, the sound of the CD-R burned through the analogue stream does actually sound better when played on other (non-HRS) systems than the original. A great sounding original disc does not seem to benefit noticeably from this method. And...not that anyone asked, but, burning a CD-R from LP via my VPI turntable usually produces CD sound superior to the standard (non-audiophile) CD. Although, to be fair, my comparisons have been primarily with 1980's CDs, before the new wave of remastering that the record labels have finally admitted was needed.

Hell Yes!
I've made a few copies from vinyls using ADC of Led Zeppelin -- Houses of the Holy, Pat Metheny -- Offramp and compared them to an originals...

It's possible that the software compresses the dynamics to make them sound "better". Since most people think that compresed dynamics sound better. (They bring out the material that a lot of equipment can't reproduce). Just look at the rave reviews of Blue Note's RVG remastering even though they had 90 - 95% of the dynamic range removed. With a few exceptions (HDCD, XRCD, DCC) it's just different flavors of distortion. This is really strange since CDs can give us perfect reproductions of music. So why are there so many different hardare and software mastering methods? I don't know and I've been an engineer in the digital audio / video field for over 10 years. Just marketing hype I guess.