Most of us know about the vinyl revival, but this thread is about CDs....

           I bought my first cd player in 1990, when I was living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and my first CD I bought was the debut album by Quatermass. It was bought at the store Record Runner in Ottawa, and was pressed in West Germany on Repertoire Records.
                The same week, I bought my first classical CD, a recording of Elgar's 1st Symphony conducted by Sir John Barbirolli with the Halle Orchestra, with also included the Introduction and Allegro for strings by Elgar and Barbirolli, as well, pressed on the label Nixa. I am not sure, but I think the store I bought it at was L'Atelier Grigorian in Ottawa.

                 As for the music's staying power, all these years later I still listen to cds and to these fledgling recordings I bought so long ago!

              What was your first CD buying experience?

          

These days I might sell some but only the ones I really don't like or don't want. Right now I'm still in the process of buying (again) all the ones I used to have that I regret selling (or giving away). I had a friend in college who I gave cds to but then a couple of years later he died of cancer. I never did get any of those back (not that it really matters). I imagine his parents donating them to a record store with the clerk having a WTF look on his (or her) face. 

I bought Journey~Escape and Saga~Behaviour, still have both. The Journey CD was pressed in Japan for US sales by CBS/Sony and the Saga was pressed by DADC which was a partnership between Sony and CBS in the US, this was the first CD pressing plant in the US started in 1983 I think in Indiana.

The Journey CD from day one gave me my first impression that this CD thing was not good, it is not a good sounding experience at all, flat and no dynamics. The Saga CD is one of my best sounding CDs I have.

Yes, I do! I think they were to deter theft. I think they stopped using them by the early 90s. When I worked in a music department of a store in the mid 90s it was those magnetic strips in the cd case instead by then.

I'm not sure if you know this but that Dire Straits cd was the first cd to go platinum in sales.

I moved to Queensland from New South Wales in mid 1992. I initially moved into a rental for six months while the house I currently live in was being built a few kilometres away. I recall buying my first CD player, but don't recall where in Queensland I was living at the time (the shopping centre where I bought the CD player isn't a clue). Let's say I got my first CD late 1992 or early 1993. I wasn't especially keen to move over to the new technology, but eventually succumbed as it was becoming clear that the old technology was becoming obsolete. I can only recall one CD although there may have been another one or two that I bought at the same time. The CD I do recall was 10cc - A Decade of Hits. I didn't have any 10cc in my collection at the time, and I never bought any since, though I do like the CD I bought.

 

Let's eat a bank!

It must have been 1988, I think. I got a second hand CD-player from a friend (yes, he was already upgrading his system with a new one...) and I may have bought a couple of CDs even before that, but it was around the same time. Not sure which was the fist one, but these are some of the first ones:

- Don Airey - K2

- GTR - GTR

- Jan Akkerman & Thijs van Leer - Focus

- Pink Floyd - Momentary Lapse of Reason

- Pink Floyd - The Wall (never had that one on vinyl...)

- Barclay James Harvest - Berlin

- Benny Andersson, Tim Rice, Björn Ulvaeus - Chess

- Asia - s/t

and a couple of cheap classical music cds.

There were some good record stores in my university town (it even had a "symphonic rock" section) and in the town nearby my parent's (all this in the Netherlands), though at that time their vinyl sections were still much bigger than their CD sections. And the vinyls were also to be found in a couple of good second hand stores, so I continued buying those too.

I bought my first (and only) CD player in 2000 in Copenhagen, and the first CD, I got, was Ragas and Sagas by Garbarek & Khan which I bought about a year before the player in a rather small specialist shop also in Copenhagen. It was a bit exiting to buy this first CD, many years after the technology came to Denmark.

Peter Gabriel - So

My wife bought it for me, then about a month later I got my first CD player

I still have it to this day, but I've been through a number of CD players since then.

Bob Marley "Live"

Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery "Dynamic Duo"

The Band "Big Pink".....sounded terrible!

Van the Man "Astral Weeks"

I still have it & cherish old CDs cut from masters without much monkeying around.   I also have my first CD player, a Sony "Disc-Man" portable, that I still love!