CDs sound better when recorded to tapes?

Not in the way you say. For classical music I actually prefer many analog recorded CD's (ie, ADD, or AAD) over the pure digital (DDD) recordings.

I seem to remember this issue coming up before, perhaps in context of direct to disc recording. There is some characteristic of a magnetic tape recording (on a top notch machine) that is pleasant to the ear.

I used to dub everything onto tape either from vinyl or cds. They do sound better on tape granted my tape deck and tapes were all good ones; whereas, the rest of my system wasn't as great (first generation CD player etc.). I always used DolbyC. Old Nak does sound fuller/warmer.

As you increase the recording level on a cassette, the high frequency response begins to roll off faster. This is true of any deck using any type and brand of tape. If you want to achieve wider bandwidth, keep the levels down. Doing this sacrifices signal to noise ratio though, so you're damned if you do and damned if you don't :( Sean
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With all the talk about copyright protection on digital discs, it seems to me that one would do fine for all but the most critical listening tests, making cassette tapes on a good machine. The only drawback I see is not being able to easily select individual tracks. Same goes for LP's. Unless you do a lot of remastering (to remove noise) why go through the hassle of digitizing them to write a CD?

Also, if you must copy a CD in digital form, I think that you could redigitize the analog playback of the original disc. If the digital recording equipment is good the digital disc you make will be as good as the playback of the original disc. All this copyright protection stuff is based on the premice that a digital copy must be made without going through an analog step. Not so. Digital to Digital is obviously the simple way to assure quality, but not the only way.