L’histoire révisionniste est une garce.
Certains des tout premiers CD étaient des sources numériques. Bon sang, ils faisaient des vinyles à partir du numérique avant l'apparition du CD. Mes tout premiers CD achetés, trois d'entre eux, dont deux étaient des DDD.
They didn't need to.
A cursory survey of the release timeline of DDD classical albums would tell you what you need to know. Stereophile's review was published in early 1983, with a bunch of followups from the much-missed JGH in which he slags the terrible quality of nearly all of the CDs (classical) he and others around him had access to over the next year or so. AAD/ADD was the norm for a long time--I very clearly recall looking high and low for a "pure" DDD recording to feed my Kenwood CD player in 1984.
Telarc had done a few digital recordings early on (I later owned a copy of their first effort: the Holst Suites for Military Band) and in retrospect it was mostly pretty gimmicky (like their notorious "digital cannon" 1812 Overture which once I heard through four(!) Klipschorns driven by a pair of H/K Citation amps in late 1985 or so).
They didn't do it in the early 80s, and they didn't do it with inflation-adjusted $150k digital recorders as "total amateurs".
How early? Best in what way? I haven't heard anyone in the recording world with this opinion.
This was not the opinion of the editorial staff of Le Monde de la musique in France nor of other musical and hifi magazines... the protests came later when the small audiophile manufacturers who provided most of the pages of advertising we are pushing hard around LP and analog sound...
As head of the MDLM record review pages, I had immediate access, in 1983, to all the classic CDs published and their sound quality was, on the contrary, already clearly superior to that of the corresponding LPs regardless of whether the CDs were in DDD or AAD or ADD... And my LP equipment was out of the question: V16 V Shure on short SME tonearm and on Sony tangential turntable. And was it the same for my colleagues and colleagues?
Funny thing, Denon LPs recorded in PCM since 1972-1973 had a great audiophile reputation and were used in hi-fi shows...
Decca is the first major to release a classic digital recording in LP form... New Year's Concert and Mahler's Fourth Symphony by Zubin Metha and Barbara Hendrix (not very very good, a little dry in the treble... like many other analog Decca recordings...)
The first classical EMI recording is a Debussy album conducted by André Previn in London (this is what is written in the cover by the person responsible for this recording): it is of stunning sonic beauty in its naturalness and the great respect for the placement of the orchestra desks in the space... The sound recording was particularly careful and the arrangement of the microphones (few in number) very well placed...
(I was one of those who recorded live FM concerts on magnetic tape and who railed against the LP, its distortions at the end of the side, its background noise, its fragility, its deficient bass, its weeping due to the disk centering problems during pressing...)