The consensus appears to be that the many of the earliest discs (roughly 1981-1989) are the ones to be wary of. Listeners often complain that these discs sound "tinny", "bright", or "thin".
However, a quick search reveals intriguing opposing views, suggesting that the supposed poor sound quality of early discs may be a myth after all. It is important not to mistake earlier, quietly-mastered CDs as inferior. Podunk from the
quartertothree forum offers the following:
"...mastering techniques have changed a lot since the 80's and early 90's. The most significant change is the tendency of mastering engineers to apply a lot of compression or hard limiting to final mix, which greatly decreases the dynamic range of a recording but makes it sound really loud and punchy. Recordings from even the early 90's sound much quieter than modern recordings because of this practice. The advantage to that kind of aggressive compression is that our ears initially percieve loud recordings as sounding generally better, bassier, punchier, etc. Also, a loud recording will reveal fewer of the weaknesses of a cheap cd player/receiver/etc, because you don't have to turn it up until you start to hear the background noise from your system. The disadvantage to that sort of mastering is that listening to a recording with very little dynamic range is fatiguing, but at first blush, that is probably the #1 reason that a new CD would sound better than an old one: at the same volume level, a new one will sound much louder and punchier."
Ethan Winer of
Music Player Network agrees, stating that some early CDs were poor due to improper mastering, but that these are the exception rather than the norm. During the early days of CDs some engineers directly used
"...master tapes meant for vinyl records, with treble added to counter the known high-frequency loss of LPs." Alan Cross published an article on
10 of the Worst-Sounding CDs of All Time, which includes the terribly hissy
My Aim is True by Elvis Costello. But you'll find that each of the early albums on his list is an example of shoddy production work at the hands of the studio and not limitations of the format or technology.
Another factor to consider is that early 80s music itself is characteristically bright and tinny, further contributing to the perceived poor sound quality in comparison to post-loudness-war era recordings. Personally, I delight in the sound of early synth-pop albums and their characteristic brightness, and if I elect I can simply adjust the equalization to taste - far better than having to deal with the over-compressed dialed-up-to-eleven victims of the loudness war!
I hope this helps to answer your question!