Vinyl VS cd - adifferent view

Few days ago a friend came to my house with a vinyl of Santana, an original cd of the same vinyl and a second cd was recording by him.
He uses softwares that "clean" the recorded cd of the noises from the vinyl.

The vinyl sounded great, the original cd sounded quite awful.

The surprise is the cd that was recorded by my friend out of the vinyl.
This cd is clearly superior to the original cd and had a "nature" that could be compare to the vinyl (although the vinyl sounded better).

This was interesting to me, my friend has a Tohorens TD 160 with the original arm, this is an inferior TT to my Linn Sondek, Armaggedon,Ittok
and I guess that the same cd recording starting out of my TT should be even a better one than the one we listened to.

He brought few more cds without a vinyl to compare to, and they sounded very good, perfectly
clear of noises, and you couldn't guess if they are original cds or were recorded by him.

Arye