I have to admit to being guilty of piling on the hype before CDs became available since I had seen and heard the Sony prototypes at two consecutive CES shows, with their CDs. I don't remember the music as much as the lack of noise and at the time, I was tired of noise. The first 25 CDs that were available were of mixed quality but I will say that Sketches of Spain and the Classical titles were very good, as were some of the others. There's no sense in picking crappy-sounding CDs to kick off a new product that had been delayed for two years and the number of initial releases was lower than expected. That said, the record industry screwed the pooch by not making sure the next releases were of the highest quality and many of them definitely fell short of what they should have been. That immediately alienated some people, caused others to wait until the players came down in price (the first model in the US, the Sony CDP-101 listed at $900). The second model was $600 and in two years, they were less than $300. The CDs SPARS code on didn't start showing DDD until '84, with Brothers In Arms, by Dire Straits. I don't know of many who think that was a bad-sounding album OR CD but by the time they got it close to "right", the initial buyers were older and didn't have the same passion for music or audio they had when they were younger. The people who adopted MP3 music are mostly the children of the first CD buyers and they usually didn't listen to music in the same way- kids are the music lovers, their parents usually hate the kids' music and by the time the kids are out of the house, the parents don't care as much, have lost enough of their hearing acuity that the differences don't really matter and they aren't spending a lot of money on audio gear unless they have a butt-load of cash, want to make it a statement or are very different from the rest.
Record companies want to make money and that's very evident in light of all of the musicians/band they screwed. They created the monster of bands and artists making mega-millions and their "need" for money was fueled by their wild spending. Well, all of the blow that was used in the '70s and '80s helped, for sure.
This all could have been avoided the record companies COULD have decided that sound quality should come in as the #2 thing they produced, with music quality being #1. The recording engineers, mastering experts/mixers, producers and others COULD have stood up to the record companies when they were told to ship sub-par tapes for mix-down and masters but when they stood the chance of losing work, they'd go along to get along. Some of the names on album jackets under "Mastered By:" and "Recording Engineer" are well known to those who used to read the liner notes like it was a favorite book and some of them are still doing this. Bernie Grundman is one, Bob Ludwig is another and they left their mark on thousands of albums because they knew how to produce great results.
FWIW, and knowing that CDs CAN sound better than vinyl and many other formats, I found an album that I had been looking for since I borrowed a copy from my guitar teacher in the late-70s. I listened to it and marveled at the sound quality, even though it needs to be cleaned. It has a few clicks but really, no pops, no major scratches and it was shiny & black, rather than dark gray. I normally don't buy used and I NEVER loan my albums because I don't want them coming back in worse condition than when they left but I bought this one anyway, because of the music. The one I had borrowed wasn't in good condition and I didn't have a stereo that was anywhere near what I have now, so I had no idea that it could sound as good as this one does. A few days later, I saw a YouTube video with Bernie Grundman and that made me wonder who did the album I had bought and found that he had mastered it. That's when I saw that it was released in 1966.
