When was this? Was it just the first few CD players they spit out? I also wonder if people thought that CD players sounded bad because they where used to the analogous sound of tapes. Is it possible that many people where suddenly experiencing accurate music for the first time and it just wasn't what they where used to, or wanted?
I was simply curious as to when, how, what happened back then to make people say CDs or CD players sounded so horrible. I have some CDs from the 80s (yes, printed in the 80s) and two CD players manufactured in 1986. These 22 year old CD players sound no different to me than the Pioneer Elite CD player I had, or the Toshiba SD-9000 DVD player I have, or the other CD players I have had short of the PS1 (the 5,000 dollar player supposedly) that sounds different, not necessarily better.
What great advances have they made on CD players to even make these high end CD players worth it? SHOW ME THE MONEY!
Seth, you have to understand that the transition from analog to digital was a monumental change of gear. In fact I would say the transition is still not entirely complete. I think one of the amazing things, is that so much was got right. There were significant problems.
It first started to dawn on anyone in touch, that a change to digital engineering was going to happen back around 1973/74. At least that was about the time it dawned on me.
Digital audio was a project given huge priority by BBC engineering, who I think have to be given great credit for really sparking the interest, and saying this will happen. They entered into a partnership with of all companies 3M, and developed the world's first digital tape recorder. They also entered into a partnership with the British mixer manufacturer Rupert Neve to develop digital processing, and the world's first digital mixer was the result. This latter was a difficult child. Rupert Neve did not really have the financial resources for such a project. It bankrupted them and they were bought by the Siemens group. The BBC, in Margaret Thatcher's view, spent far too much taxpayer money on it, and there were budgetary retributions.
At the same time Herr Willi Studer owner of Studer Revox saw the sun setting on the analog era. He hired a brilliant digital engineer Roger Lagadec to oversee their program. The result was Dash recorders and huge strides in digital processing. They became the world leaders in professional digital recording technology, as they had been in analog.
On the consumer front, Phillips/Sony developed an alliance to develop a consumer digital product for music playback, this took off in earnest around 1980. The CD and the Red Book standards came into being I think it is really remarkable, that at that time, given the available processing power, that they were able to come up with a system that has had almost a quarter century of dominance.
So what were the problems? Well, then current playback systems for one. Many,if not most, receivers of the time had inadequate headroom on their early high gain stages. Speakers were a huge problem. The LP rolls off slightly at both ends. Tweeters particularly were stressed and many fried. It took ferrofluid and many other advances to solve those problems. I saw this coming, and started making wide dynamic range analog recordings back around 1973. By 1984 I had developed speakers well able to cope with the wide dynamic range of the CD.
The first CD players had significant problems. This was mainly related to the analog circuits! Because of the inability to process in the analog domain, those early players had atrocious anti aliasing and brick wall filters.
I think every audio historian would point to the Revox B 225 designed by Roger Lagadec as the first CD player to offer anything comparable to the best analog had to offer. Shortly after this player appeared, guess who hired Roger Lagadec away from Herr Willi Studer! Sony!
I bought my first CD player in 1984, it was the Revox B225. It cost the high sum then of $1200. It is a superb player. Unfortunately about four years ago it developed mechanical trouble with the CD draw. It is on my restore list.
I can't stress enough how loudspeaker deficiencies, in particular, contributed to the reputation for harshness in the early CD era. My personal torture test was a superbly recorded Phillips CD of Ely Amerling singing Schubert Lieder. One of my colleagues familiar with my rig wanted to upgrade his system for CD playback, and get the Revox B 225. I remember taking this disc to Hi-Fi Sound in Minneapolis, where they had a lot of very expensive speakers to audition. Not one speaker could reproduce that disc! Everyone produced gross distortion on the voice, at certain points, at very moderate levels. Most would have blamed the CD. The sales staff did, but we knew otherwise.
So we ended up at Van Alstine's house in Burnsville. He makes the Van Alstine amps in his basement. At the time he was the B & W dealer in the Twin Cities. My friend bought the top of the line B & W monitor, now recently replaced with the B & W 800 Ds
