Thanks gvl for your response. I do understand what you are trying to convey, but there are a few misconceptions I think.
Day one for Philips was March 1st 1983 with the TDA-1540 ceramic pack 14 bit converter with a 4x OS chipset. Day one resolution was 15.6 bits (according to Philips) Philips used two, one for each channel.
Day one for Sony, October 1st 1982 was the CDP-101(commercially released in Japan, six months before Philips) with the in-house produced CX-20017 16 bit D/A with a 16 bit resolution. Sony used one and shared it between channels, but made some tweaks to minimise the phase delay.
Many cheaper machines used the existing Toshiba 14 bit non oversampled converter in the early years of CD. Unfortunately, that meant budget buyers didn't hear what the format was capable of.
At the time of release, the playback equipment (CD players) exceeded the abilities of any and all recording equipment in terms of ENOB. The A/Ds simply weren't anywhere near 16 bits with decent linearity.
So we had domestic replay equipment with noise floors down -93dB or more, but recordings (particularly classical with very quiet parts and large dynamic range), that either tailed off into 'fuzz' or echoes that were lost in 'fuzz'. We'd turned up the volume to hear the super quiet bits, not realising that THD at low levels in PCM was extremely high. We were used to analogue where low levels seemed OK (albeit 30dB greater in level) and it was the loud bits that distorted. Digital was the polar opposite.
As time went on, the A/Ds and recordings got better. Very quickly in fact. It is my belief that much of the early criticism of the CD players themselves was completely unfounded. I have many CD players and plenty of 1st and 2nd gen classics in my collection. They are audibly indistinguishable from many later TOTL units and often very difficult to separate on the test bench.
The technical test CDs released in 1982/3 showed what the format and the machines of the day were capable of- it was the commercial releases of actual music that hadn't caught up. That said, there are some exceptions and they were frequently used as demos in the early years.
Cheers.