When CDs first came onto the market in 1982 .......

@bikeboy52 I feel your pain man. When I was living in NYC in the late 1980s and my roommate was moving out he asked repeatedly for all my vinyl cause we’d gotten caught up in the CD thing. For some reason I had the fortitude to say no and thank the audio Gods I did cause I’m reviving my analog system and those records would probably all be in a landfill now. To answer the OP’s question, yeah there were immediate benefits to CDs. They were much easier to play, had no pops or clicks and required no cleaning, and they sounded more dynamic with more and cleaner treble that was initially really intoxicating. Then reality set in that, as my system got better the “perfect sound forever” just left me cold and sounded overly processed or sterile. In the early 90s I bought a DBX CD player from Crazy Eddie’s that had some settings to hide some of the warts, but it was just a bandaid for what was then just bad DDD recording or bad digital transfer. Thankfully at that time I went back to business school and of necessity separated myself from audio for about 10 years. But then I got back into audio in a big way and started writing reviews where, you know what? — digital got some religion and realized some of its sins (I’m looking at you jitter) and things got a lot better. I remember reviewing an Ayre CD player and a Bel Canto DAC and thinking — “yeah, this is real music again.” So there was hope for the future. Not going any further here, but between better digital technology and high-quality streaming I think we’ve finally got something here. So the initial, yet severely flawed, initial medium has finally matured into a real rival to vinyl sonically while adding extreme convenience and accessibility to worlds of music in the mix. What a great time to be an audiophile!

I started off with a pretty decent TT, so it was not really a fair comparison.
But all the CD players sounded OK.

My first player was a Sony CDP 101.   It sounded like crap compared to today's players.    I remember for about 4 months I could barely find any titles I liked.   

That player was $1000 in late 1982/1983......  I think I paid $600 as an open box unit at Manufacturer 's Marketplace in W Roxbury MA.    That was a great place that had some pretty good brands that were overstocked / c,osed out.   It was like a dream being in that place as a 15 year old kid.   I purchased quite a few things there with my paper route money

On some of those first CD’s the (cheap) record companies just pressed the vinyl master onto the cd. Those did not sound good. 

It’s seems a bit later than 82 but yeah it was awesome. But everything was when you are young. I was an early adopter I think. I remember it being some sort of int unit by Mitsubishi. Me and the gang blown away. To be able to go direct to any track we wanted was the greatest invention since the microwave.

I forget what it was called with cassettes but on better decks you could do extreme fast forward and listen for a break in the sound and stop and you should be at the next track. It took a good finger to get it right. And if you wanted three songs forward trying to listen for three breaks (silence) while fast forwarding. Ugh

CD changed everything for ease of use. Don’t think I was even worried about sound quality. It was too cool to care.

Ah the 80s. What a blast.