My first CD player was a Philips CD350 (2 x TDA1540 14 Bit + SAA7030 digital filter IC) It was a hand-me-down from my six year older brother because he bought a newer more fancier one. A Sony CDP-68 (1 x Philips TDA1541 & CXD1088). The filter chip is much better. (2)
I was over the moon with it. It was so much better than Vinyl. The disk itself was also less susceptible to scratches and if they were present the CRC (cyclic redundancy check) usually did a good job masking or correcting those errors. I'm very careful with handling my CDs and vinyl records. I even bought special inner sleeves with anti-static plastic inside. I once made a stupid mistake to lend a LP to a friend. It came back with a scratch on side B. Scratches on LPs give those very annoying impulse noises. (sharp, very brief and high amplitude. like a fire cracker). Needless to say we aren't friends anymore.. The album in question was "A Saucerful Of Secrets" by Pink Floyd published in 1968 a year before I was born. Luckily the scratch wasn't on my favorite track "Jugband Blues". My dad bought it and he didn't like it. You got to bekidding me. So he gave it to me when he gave me his old turntable Dual 1224 (vintage 1973). For the people in the know it had a piezo electric cartridge with a diamond stylus. In disc jockey jargon, the stylus, and sometimes the entire cartridge, is often called the needle. Vinyl enthusiasts will probably laugh at you if you use that colloquial term.
A few years later (1889-1991. Don't know exactly) i had a Technics SL1200 direct drive (vintage 1976), a-hand-me-down from my dad who was also into Hi-fi and an unrepentant gear-head and my most priced possession was a Nakamichi BX300 Three Head Dual Capstan Stereo Cassette Deck (Already obsolete at the time but I loved the pitch control and Dolby C). And a very old and probably broken Philips receiver (It had a hum problem and if you turned the volume knob it made crackling noises. This was probably caused by a dirty potentiometer but i couldn't be bothered repairing it)
Some background..... The 16 bit conversion system with the 14 bit TDA1540 Converter system worked with 4 x oversampling.
The digital part in the conversion is done by the SAA7030 IC. (very crude interpolating one). The 16 bit input is four times oversampled followed by a FIR filter. The output of the filter is 28 bits. The output of the filter is subsequently matched to 14 bit by means of a first order noise shaper. This "trick" will result in the same in band quantizing SNR (QSNR) as from a 16 bit converter. After the conversion there's a spurious response at 176.4 Khz present (duh) in the hold circuit of the D/A. This is removed by a third order Bessel–Thomson filter because we don't want to introduce any group delay distortion. This is followed by a low order low cost analog linear phase filter. If they didn't had used oversampling they would have been forced to use a high order low pass filter to suppress the 44.1 +/- 20 Khz lobe and they are relatively complicated (many terms) to implement and expensive to make in hardware. The end result was that CD-players got a lot more affordable.
I was only 18 or 19 and I didn't have a fancy stereo (yet). The first thing I bought from my part-time job were the The Mission 70 MkIIs bookshelf speakers. Even then I already knew that the speakers are always the most important of the whole system. I thought they sounded nice with plenty of bass for their size (3).
The word audiophile wasn't used (by us) back in the day. Hi-fi is not be confused with Hi-End. The saying "you get what your pay for" isn't valid (anymore). There's plenty of cheap gear out there that performs better. Some Hi-End has better build quality and aesthetics. But as my mother always says "It's what's inside that counts" It's a cliché but they're often true. And beauty is in the eye of the beholder....
Before you buy a new DAC. Invest in some decent speakers first. I recommend buying some active ones so you don't have to invest in an amplifier.
(1) datasheet
http://vasiltech.narod.ru/files/SAA7030.pdf
(1) datasheet:
https://www.alldatasheet.com/view_datasheet.jsp?Searchword=CXD1088
(2)
https://www.whathifi.com/features/old-speakers-vs-new-speakers-how-do-they-compare
Take these impressions with a a few pounds of salt because they're subjective. They were recommended to me by my local hi-fi shop salesman. They would cost $269 a piece now if you take inflation into account. That was a lot of money for me during that time but
definitely worth it.