Burned CDs can sound better than the original?

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.

I burn CD's on my computer, which sports a DVD drive; and I consider my rig to be fairly hi resolution. I've noted fairly consistently that on MOST main-stram labels, the sound quality increases with the burned copy; and with something like an XRCD and other hi-end recordings, it decreases some. With the XRCD's in particular, the literature talks about how they go thru all this trouble to reduce jitter in their final product. This suggest to me that it may well be a jitter thing, since most of the purist labels use higher quality converters (ADC's and DAC's). Of course, this is only speculation on my behalf.

In either case, the differences are not usually enormus, and in some cases a difference is very difficult to detect. I always end up with a copy that I'm happy with....I am not going to dubb my collection, and I'm not going to buy something that I can copy.

Also, when dubbing the more Hi-end labels; using Gold blanks closes the gap even more, sometimes making them indistinguishable. These have come down to under $3.00/pc

This is just an experience sharing. So far with three brands of CD recorders, we have not yet experienced better sound from the CD-Rs than the original recording CDs.

One of the reasons that we guess is the signal pick up rate from the CD-Rs, which is around 95% of the original CDs. Therefore, we can not be sure that the result is caused by jitter reduction. Instead, we noticed some dynamics and resolution losses. However, this sometimes makes harsh CDs sound smoother.

First off, CD-Rs, when done at 1X speed are certainly as good as the originals, IMO. And early on, I was convinced that some of my CD copies actually sounded more "crisp", or very slightly more "live" than the originals. I have no explanation for this, and I would not be willing to be blind tested on it. I am very pleased, amazed even, at the quality of CD copies. I use a Pioneer 739 CD dubbing recorder, so there are no external ICs. Cheers. Craig