Your first CD(s)

I think the first four issued were SUPERTRAMP's Crime of the Century, FLEETWOOD MAC's Rumours, TALKING HEADS Remain in Light and some classical disc--though I may be wrong. I remember soon owning YES' Close to the Edge and Fragile as well as KING CRIMSON's ITCOTCK, but Crime of the Century was definitely my first.

Ignoring the Audiophilatelists, who in 1985 still favoured reel-to-reel tape and valve/tube amps over vinyl and solid-state, (and whose opinions of CD and digital would never be positive in a million years of smashing their heads against an anechoic chamber wall), CD was struggling to live up to the hype and everyone looked for explanations of why CD wasn't all it was cracked up to be every-which-way and jumped on every plausible explanation thrown our way to little avail.

While we know now that this was primarily because the remastering didn't make full use of the advantages (and limitations) of the new media, and in some cases in the rush to re-issue vinyl in CD format they weren't even remastered, at the time everyone jumped on the SPARS codes, {AAD, ADD and DDD}, since there appeared to be a direct correlation between albums that sounded blegh! [AAD] and those that sounded yay! [DDD]. In reality SPARS codes weren't an indicator of quality at all and so began the backlash against digital recording and mixing that persists to this day (which again is no indicator of quality).

The other perceived "problem" was down to the hardware, I guess we all remember those every expensive CD players festooned with buzz-words like oversampling, interpolation, anti-aliasing, sin(X)/X (which no lay-person can really understand no matter what they try and tell you) and such passing fads as the MASH converter and that over-priced nonsense, when most of the real issues were mechanical rather than electronic but as Sony & Philips had the joint monopoly on transport manufacture no one could do anything about.