Big source improvement using CD player

This is not remotely how error correction works. There are many errors correction levels and it is most certainly not a "guess". The only time data is interpolated is after all the error correction fails which is very rare if the disk does not have significant scratches.

With a well aligned transport, which most are even inexpensive, and well aligned writer, BER for a good quality CDR media can be lower than a manufactured disk.

No wonder the burnt cd’s always sound brighter to many, there’s many more errors being fixed, and that’s just a 50% chance to get a 1 or a 0 correct, because an error is replaced by what was read before, and that’s a 50% chance to get it right. This is why many CD players won’t even play burnt cd’s as they can’t even read the TOC (table of contents)

Go away, like I said can't see the forest through the trees. 

For those interested in what happens when a byte can't be read.

  If a scratch has created read errors, you’re not completely hosed., "there is a pretty good chance that an uncorrected byte still has a good byte on either side". If that’s the case, then your CD player will take an average for those two values "and make an "educated guess" about what the missing value should be in between".
If the number of missing bytes gets to be too large, the system will suppress the error by muting the sound for a fraction of a second, which is hopefully too short a period of time to be detected.
At a certain point, of course, you’ll start to hear the difference. Like when the CD starts to repeat.

Cheers George   

Streamed for 2-3 weeks.  
Prefer cd and LP. 
  Vinyl to me is the best sound!
 The mild crackles, ticks, pops are pure magic to me!

 Which is why I record my LP’s to cd, and clean up a bit, but still love the vinyl tone.

 Vinyl is the only music I play which my dogs (rip) never left the room, no matter the music, metal, blues, etc, they never left my side.
laid on the couch with me, at my feet, etc!

 I would put on a cd, and within 5 minutes, they would get up, and lay in the kitchen or upstairs.

 Strange, goes to show the mellow tone and great sound of vinyl!

arctikdeth
, but still love the vinyl tone.

Try putting a 1kohm 1/4w resistor between L & R output of the cd player or dac your using, to bleed the channel separation down to around 30db
It will richen things up a little as the best vinyl can do is 30db at 1khz but in the bass and up high it’s much worse around 10db.

What the 1kohm resistor does on the cdp or dac output is across the board approx 30db of channel separation, reducing it down some 80db from 110db, not exactly mimicking vinyl channel separation but a simple way to get the idea.
The ideal would be a passive network between L & R to copy the channel separation characteristics of the Lyra cartridge graph below

This is the channel separation of a expensive Lyra phono cartridge, lower traces are the channel separation curves.
https://ibb.co/FhhbHNZ

Cheers George

The Reed Solomon error detection and correction algorithms are much more effective for predictable errors like radial scratches and fingerprints than for unpredictable errors like scattered CD laser light and fluttering of the CD whilst playing, for which the laser servo feedback mechanism is not 100% effective. External vibration is also a big challenge for both Reed Solomon and the laser servo feedback system. That is why the sound you hear from a CD is missing information that is clearly audible on the vinyl or tape version of the same recording. And it’s why CDs frequently sound hard and 2-dimensional and sour. It’s not the CD’s fault, it’s the CD player’s fault. The CD itself contains all the intricate nano scale physical information, you just can’t extract the information correctly without rectifying all the inherent problems in the CD player. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.