Big source improvement using CD player

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.

For those that are interested when there is a bit-error, or even multiple bit errors, I do suggest reading about how it works, not the inaccurate guess stated below. Interpolation only occurs when errors cannot be corrected. There are multiple levels of error correction and fully 25% of the data on a CD is redundant. If you don’t scratch your CDs, then you will have almost no unfixable errors on your whole CD.

Contrary to what many believe, you don’t have data bits and error correction bits all closely packed physically, they are spaced around the CD to reduce the impact of scratches. You don’t have a "good byte" on either side that is used to guess the one in the middle. That is not remotely what happens. That only happens if the scratches / defects are so severe that error correction cannot correct them. The methodology used for CDs allow full correction of up to 4000 bits, or about 2.5mm:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.462.3524&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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.