There is no specific time period when CD's started sounding good or bad. It has always been a crap shoot. Some/lots/most popular music CD's sound like crap. They have been overproduced, over tweaked and compressed within an inch of their lives. The CD's you mention sound bad not because of inferior AtoD circuits but because of poor mixing and mastering. Place the blame where it belongs. Whoever masters and approves those masters should be forced to listen to that crap for eternity. At the very least they should be fired.
If you think they have got it right I suggest you compare the vinyl and CD issues of Red Hot Chili Peppers latest. Steve Hoffman mixed and mastered the vinyl and it sounds great. Some deaf gorilla did the CD and it sounds like he was a particularly stupid gorilla. It's a crap shoot. Return the ones that sound bad and tell the sales clerk they're defective. If you do this twice with the same selection they will let you take something else in exchange. I have experience with this.

I bought a very early Sony FD-3030 CD player in October of 1984, and at the same time I bought a CD put out by DELOS called "Joe Williams; Nothin' but the Blues".

That CD sounds excellent today over my SONY SCD-777ES with the digital output going to a THETA Pro Basic 3 with balanced outputs. DELOS used Soundsteam recorders from the start, which were much better than the other recording equipment at that time.

The point is that CD has always had the potential to sound very very good, but that for the first 10 years (at least), most recordings were made on equipment that could not do the job adequately to provide high quality.

Furthermore, the playback hardware, particularly the DAC chips used in 99% of the CD players, were not of sufficient quality to sound decent.

Another totally separate issue is how the sound was engineered in the first place; are the recordings you mentioned available on vinyl? If so, I will bet they sound cruddy on vinyl too, because they were engineered to sound good on AM radio and boom-boxes, which tends to be incompatible with sounding good on a high-quality audio system. A lot of pop recordings are either engineered with inadequate attention to sound quality or the engineered with a sonic palette in mind that is not conducive to good sound on an accurate playback system.

Bottom line; I think we are now at the point where it is provable that the CD medium can provide excellent sound quality, given high quality equipment to properly process the sound in the recording process, and given an excellent unit for playback.

My SONY SCD-777ES sounds excellent, through the THETA DAC, and pretty good as a stand-alone player. Unfortunately, SACD playback requires that I use it on its own, and I do not think I am getting what I want from SACD; they sound fairly good, but not as good as I suspect they can sound.

I have about 1500 standard CDs, and I would say that 30% of them give me really excellent sound, 50% sound pretty good, and 20% sound fair or really bad. Some very good ones started from analog masters, but have been converted to digital in recent years, such as the excellent EVEREST/VANGUARD recordings from the 1960 era, and also the MERCURY and RCA recordings from the aerly stereo days. Many others are recordings done more recently; since the evolution of the recording process varies with different companies and engineers, the timeline cannot be narrowed down easily to some magic year.

I have an AYRE C5xe on order, and am fairly confident, given the rave reviews in Stereophile and The Absolute Sound last year, that it will sound as least as good as what I have now with CDs, and a lot better playing SACDs.

"recorded sound of almost any pedigree has passed through a complex mixing console at least once; prominent parts like vocals or lead guitar will almost certainly have passed through at least twice, once for recording and once at mix-down. More significantly, it must have passed through the potential quality-bottleneck of an analogue tape machine or more likely the A-D converters of digital equipment.
In its long path from here to ear the audio passes through at least
a hundred op-amps,
dozens of connectors and
several hundred metres of ordinary screened cable."
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm#6

There are some recording studios addressing the issues presented in the quote.

Of course, depending on the type of music recorded and the musicians goals, minipulation is many times needed.

That and as previously mentioned, the quality of the recording engineers and associated monitoring equipment etc.

In my mind, I kind of have this marker of 1994-1995... it seems around then, more CDs were getting remastered with dither and better ADCs. Compared to the ear bleeder versions of these same discs from the 80s, it was like night and day (less harshness, less grain, less glare.)

I know a lot of guys over at the Steve Hoffman forums prefer CDs from the 80s because they're less compressed. While I'm not a fan of the overly compressed discs commonly found today, I don't think the whole story lies in just the lack of compression. I would rather have a smoother treble and truer instrumental timbre and sacrifice a little dynamics if I had to choose. Statements like that might get me burned at the stake over at Steve Hoffman's forums, but, I can't stand a good number of 80s period discs because they sound incredibly hard and brittle to me. I'm saddened by many reissue discs of today as well... too much noise reduction and compression. New discs suffer as well. Oh well.

Ummmmmm When was that ?!?!?!?

I have always had a fearful dread of

Jeff,i still remember the first cd i bought.It was Alan Parson's Project "Pyramid".Even today,that cd sounds quite good.True,first cds weren't as good as todays but not all !

Amen, Joe. Choose any "era" or decade, and you get a mix of the good and the bad. I think the first CD's (early '80's?) had a tendency to sound too grainy, two-dimensional, and screechy. But, still, I have some of those, and they sound better than the ones I bought yesterday, with the most up-to-date technology. But only a few. I think, generally, the state of the art has advanced. Idiots are idiots, however, and the tone-deaf will always be with us, and so will badly-mastered CD's. Some modern productions, over-reacting to the accusations of glare and screech, have simply killed all the dynamics and upper-midrange life, and the result is turning up the volume control until the room shakes with dead music. The production process will always be an art, and there will never be enough artists, in any decade.

I hope my comments weren't taken as a blanket statement covering all CDs. There are always exceptions and a variety of reasons why something might sound bad (or good.) Source material consisting of later generation tapes (or ones EQed for LP, but, used for the CD transfer), bad ADCs, etc. could all factor in as to why a disc might sound bad. I've got some relatively early discs that sound quite good.

One of the earliest CD releases I have is Elvis Costello's 1st album on Columbia (it's even in its 1st generation smooth edged case with no ribbing.) It is one of the worst things I've ever heard; it's dreadful... noisy and harsh. I compare late 80s Blue Note (Capitol distributed) CDs to their mid 90s Japanese counterparts and the difference is the sonic equivalent between chewing gravel with your teeth and spreading pat

No,not at all Jeff. And to add another thing,i remember back in the mid-eighties,there was a talk about certain mastering plants not being quite suitable for cd manufacturing.Perhaps this is one of the many reasons many cds back then weren't that good.

Hello, Good topic!
I agree with the posters who say that it is a crap shoot. I have some early CDs in my collection that sound wonderful and I have some from the last few years that sound abysmal.
I have "Nevermind" on LP from the early 90s and trust me it sounds bad there too. It was cut at such a low level that you have to crank the amp way up to get any kind of volume. The music really suffers.
Starting in the late 90s I found that CDs made from digital masters tend to sound better than CDs made from analog masters. You would think that the analog master would add some warmth but I haven't found that to be the case.
It's all just a crap shoot, CDs and LPs alike.

All I can relate is my personal experience. MY first CD player was a DBX DX-5 that incorporated a dynamic range expander/compressor into it's circuitry. This allowed me to adjust the playback for some of the defects in mastering, such as compression. The system it was connected to consisted of a Yamaha A-900 integrated amp and some Advent II loudspeakers. I enjoyed listening to that setup until the player finally couldn't track many of my CD's properly and the foam surounds on the Advents finally fell into dust. So, off to the hifi shop I went. Got a California Audio Labs DX-2 and set of Infinity bookshelf speakers. BTW, those Infinities were probaly a huge mistake but I had installed Infinity speakers in my car and those sounded fantastic and the CAL player had realy wiped out my budget. With that combination, the only time that I listened to a CD was when I was recording it to tape. Brittle and harsh was that system. Fast forward about 10 years and the Yamaha is picking up police radios and getting very noisy with any change in volume adjustment. So I got myself a new NAD amp with a set of PSB T-45 tower speakers. Suddenly, I now have a system that actually allows me to enjoy my CD's straight without being "filtered" thru cassette tapes. Bottomline, my CD's got better simply because I finally got around to getting a decent set of speakers and an amplifier that wasn't on it's last legs.

One thing that tweaks my curiosity is that I actually have 2 copies on Born to Run on LP and one on CD. I should note that the CD version is the "gold" version, if that makes any difference. Listening to the CD on the CAL player exhibits a "bright" characteristic, the high frequencies sound a bit overemphacized. What is interesting is that If I put the CD in my 100 dollar Philips DVD player, and set it to upsample at 88.2 mhz, the CD sounds almost identical to my LP. It's still just a tiny touch brighter than the LP but now the LP sounds just a touch dull. However, when I play the CD at 44.1 mhz on the Philips it sounds identical to the CAL player with the highs tipped up a bit too much. Why upsampling the CD seems to change the tonal balance slightly I do not know, perhaps someone more up to date on CD playback can explain it. What I do know is that I LIKE IT, that Philips just became my default player for listening to my CD's.

I think that what makes a CD enjoyable is playing it on good equipment and perhaps upsampling it. It won't correct for a lousy mix but that's always been a problem with any source. I have some re-issues of Creedence Clearwater Revival on LP's that are simply unlistenable. However, an Autralian import CD of CCR on the EMI Thailand label is quite enjoyable. Of course I'll never give up on Vinyl, as good as my CD's now sound there are occasions when I hear a hint of grain that I have never heard on a well recorded LP.

PS, after playing Born to Run from beginning to end, something I haven't done in years, I put on some Shubert. Op.114, the "Trout" quintet and all I can say is that the new system sounds really really good with anything I thow at it. Kudo's to NAD, PSB, and Philips, you make some great gear. BTW, it's the Philips DVP5960 and I hear that Circuit City has them on sale for something like 60 bucks. I think I'll get another and put it into storage so I have a spare when this one starts mistracking due to a dirty laser, heck it sounds so darn good I may get 2 spares.

Scooter,
Thanks for the tip about the Philips DVP5960. I'm very interested. Can it upsample any higher than 88.2? I've been looking for an affordable "in" to try upsampling.

It will do either 2x at 88.2 or 4x at 176.4 mhz. The only "nits" that I would pick for the upsampling is that either option reduces the output by about 6db. It would be interesting to know how the upsampling was actually done. I have had a major interest in photography for over 30 years and, in photography, upsampling in multiples of 2 is a definite no no. It can result in some obvious "stair stepping" in an image. To prevent this, many digital photographers upsample images in odd numbered multiples, or use the square root of 2 in multiple steps. Of course I have no idea what "stair steeping" would sound like aurally. However, if Phillips used digital imaging's experience in developing their upsampling routine, the result would be a smoother output waveform with a slightly "smeared" waveform when compared to a straight 2x multiple. Perhaps that's what took some of the "edge" from the sound of the Born to Run CD.

You'll also want to remember that it is a DVD player first. Which means that you'll have to have it connected to a TV in order to see the screen menu when your setting it up. As for output options, it has S video, 2 RCA jacks for stereo, and HDMI for Video and digital sound. I have mine connected to the TV with the HDMI output and the amplifier with the RCA outputs.

BTW, I have previously posted a comparison between the Philips and the CAL players with both sampling at 44.1 mhz. To my ears they are identical, both in output levels and sound quality. I hadn't attempted comparing them using the upsampling because of the distinct change in output levels. This time I tried the upsampling simply because my turntable output is reduced compared to the CAL player and was hoping the lower output of the Philips when upsampling would give a better match in level. It did, but it wasn't perfect so when doing the a/b comparison to the LP I was having to tweak the volume at every change. Which is when I learned that the upsampling resulted in the high frequencies sounding just a bit more "LP like".

You should also know that I have taken some knocks for advocating such an inexpensive player. To those who question how good a player this really is, I can only say "try one for yourself". At this price, if you don't like the sound, you can either pitch it or just use it to watch movies. My only wish is that it could play the SACD format, as it is it will play standard CD's, CD-R's, and DVD audio but SACD got left out.