???????? Homemade CD's should sound identical to the original. If they don't sound good, then neither did the original.
BTW, if you have a lot of stuff on vinyl, you CAN clean it up and then xfer it to CD. There is an old radio-station trick I learned that gets rid of a lot of clicks, pops, etc...for a short period of time, which is usually long enough to transfer them. WASH the LP in water and LEAVE IT WET. Put it on the turntable and record it into your computer, using an editing program. There are many many of them out there. You will notice that the LP sounds a lot cleaner when played WET. You'll want to then dry it off with lint-free towels and store it.
In the editing program, you may then explode the editing scale, where little pops, clicks, etc., will be easily resolved as little spikes in the audio waves. You can edit out these sounds with ZERO discernable impact on the audio when played at normal speed. It's a time-consuming process, but when you're done, you'll have a scratch-click-pop-free copy of your classic. We used to do the same thing at radio stations, copying a tune to 30-ips noise-reduced mag tape. Then, we'd razor-blade out the imperfections, and the result was plenty good enough for air.
Michael
I should qualify my earlier statement. CD compiliations made from my existing music collection sound great. That is because I keep the music in .wav format. It's when I rip to MP3 that I start losing some serious quality. I currently RIP at 160kbps (higher bitrates suck up hard drive space too quickly) and that sounds okay, but nothing like the original. Getting MP3s off the web from others is even dicier. It can be difficult to find good quality MP3s on the web.