I don’t remember the exact date, but it must have been the early '80s. A radio station I was listening to talked about CDs and played “The Sound of Silence” on CD to see how it sounded.
I had been reading about the development of CDs since the very early 80s, then finally bought a Technics CD player for my 40th birthday in 1985. At the time, CDs were rather boutique items, relegated to a small corner of record stores, starting with the classical section. It wasn’t long before they really took off, as more varied content became available.
The first CD I bought was by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus.
Probably around 1987-88.
I worked with a guy in 1983 - 1984 who was an audiophile. During that time, he was eager to replace his vinyl records with CDs because of their amazing sound qualities. At that time, I believe the price of CDs was several times the LP or cassette price, but he was buying them anyway. The big obstacle for him was that very few of the rock albums he wanted to replace were available on CD yet.
I bought my first CD in 1987: Document by R.E.M. I lived with my brother at the time. He had just bought a CD player.
I watched something on TV around 1982, where a couple has a fight, because one of them spent some windfall money on a CD player. Before then, I’d heard the term, but wasn’t clear it was a new format for music production.
I didn’t personally get one until you couldn’t buy vinyl anymore. Then when writable players for computers came out, I bought one for my computer, and a player for my car.
The first store selling CDs that I saw opened in Salt Lake City in 1983 or 1984. They had a monopoly in the city on them – the record stores weren’t fast to jump on the bandwagon. I recall that one of the clerks wore a broken CD on a chain around her neck. It was pretty clearly intended as a status symbol (The broken CD is glittery and multicolored , like diamonds. But it also means I’ve had these long enough to break one.)
At the same time, I attended a lecture at the University by someone in the industry who complained that he’d been trying to get CDs into the marketplace for years, and that he still didn’t understand why they weren’t already putting out movies on such digital discs. But that, too, was years in the future.
First learned of their existence while in Japan in 1985. Bought my first CD sometime around 1988.
Just curious, at what price point did you buy your first CD burner? I got mine for $499, plus another $199 for a good SCSI II card. It was 2x, but that was plenty fast considering that buffer underun technology hadn’t been invented yet. (Blanks were $12 each.)
The guy was an idiot. LaserDisc came out in 1978 (and SelectaVision in 1981.) So there were already two disc-based movie media available at the time. If his hang-up was that they were analog, not digital, then he had not a clue about the realities of digital media. At the roughly NTSC resolution of 320x240, 24 bits per pixel, 30fps, uncompressed digital video is around 23 GB an hour, not counting audio. At the roughly DVD resolution of 640x480, that goes up to 92 GB per hour. No 5-inch disc at the time could hold that much data, and I’m not sure if a 12-inch one could. As for decoding compressed video, that takes a lot of computer power (relative to the time.) When I bought my first DVD-ROM in 1998, my CPU could run rings around the best supercomputer of 1984, but it still wasn’t fast enough to decode DVDs in realtime and required a separate hardware decoder card with a cludgy loop-back cable connecting to the video card.
I heard about them sometime in the mid-1980s, but more in the context of something cool in development in the back of “Popular Science” or 'Discover". I remember video laserdiscs (the ones that were record-sized) even earlier, but only in the context of the highest-end electronics available at the home electronics store.
I got my first stereo with a CD player around 1989-ish IIRC. Before my senior year of high school anyway (1990-1991), and got a handful of CDs, because they were pretty expensive- like $20, in 1989 dollars (something like $35 in today’s money). It took until probably 1995 or so before CDs had nearly entirely supplanted cassette tapes- I remember buying a tape as late as 1994, because I wanted to listen in my truck, which only had a tape deck.
In those early days, cassettes were a lot more practical for portable and car stereos, because CD players had a tendency to skip when they were bumped or in motion (before electronic skip protection became commonly available).
Plus CDs were touted for their superior sound quality, but that superiorness couldn’t be appreciated over the road noise in a moving car. And if you still had an extensive collection of cassettes, you couldn’t listen to them on a CD player, but CDs could be easily copied onto cassette to make your music portable.
1983 or 1984. Went to a high end stereo store and the salesman tried to sell me one. The only music he had was jazz and Rod Stewart. I said I’d pass. It was probably close to or over $1000 unadjusted dollars for the player.
Got my first player in late 1985, and my first disc was A-ha. That disc still plays fine, no degradation at all. Remember when they sold discs in those yuuge boxes because they were afraid of theft?
And I bought my most recent disc this weekend. You streamers and your hoity-toity attitude. Steaming doesn’t sound as warm and have as much presence as a CD!
The first CD I ever bought was a Thelonious Monk album. I remember unwrapping it in the parking lot, and not being able to figure out how to open the case.
I see what you did there. 
(If anything, Dopers seem to have been aware of CD’s a few years earlier than average, I’d say average was closer to 1987 in North America, maybe slightly earlier in Europe.)
I don’t remember at all. I do remember that I had to put more RAM in my computer to be able to use it, so I spent like $40 on RAM, and I downloaded my first music program, because whatever the default Windows program was, was uploading CDs like molasses in January.
Also, when I burned a music CD, it took time. You hit burn, then went and took a shower, or made a sandwich, or something.
(Whoops—just remembered this was junior year, so '87-88. There was someone living on my floor the previous year who had a CD player, though.)
My friends started getting CDs in the late 80s. I joined Columbia House (remember that?) to get my own in 1989.
By the time I got to college, fall of 1993, CDs were ubiquitous, as far as I remember it. I do remember CD burners being uncommon until the late 90s. I played in a band in college in '97 and '98, and I remember we still had to go to a media lab at my university to burn a CD, since nobody we knew had CD burners at the time. Portable mass storage at that time was of the Zip disk variety (god, I hated those things–I’ve lost so much data to disk failures) and Jaz disks.
I can’t for the life of remember when a CD player first showed up in our house. I know I got a Sony Discman for Christmas of 1992, so they must have been pretty affordable by that time. So my guess would have been around 1990-1991.
ETA: Oh, sorry, that’s an answer to the average person having a CD player. Hearing of them? I would guess 1985/1986 or so, but I was only 11 at the time.
The first time I *remember *hearing about CDs was at Middlebury in the summer of '89, but I’m sure I already knew they’d been around for some time.
I got the Beach Boys’ album Still Cruisin’ in 1989 when it came out. I had recently turned seven years old. It was the first CD I had known, and my parents had to buy me a little CD-playing boom box to play it on. Up until then I had only known records and tapes.
But I’m sure people who were adults in the 80s were aware of CDs long before I was.