[old_tv_nut]

The brief high sales were obviously due to the low sale price.

Yes, CD pressing was a problem. You may know that the audio CD standard includes two cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon forward error correcting codes. Players added an error interpolation process to mask uncorrectable errors. Even with all that, some early discs had uncorrectible audible errors or were even worse in that the player wouldn't track the disc and would skip or get stuck on a segment.

Audio magazines were full of player tests showing how large a segment of a disc could be destroyed and still play well on different machines.

I believe that later the discs got so good that some cheap decoder ICS deleted one layer of error correction and just relied on one code plus interpolation.

These days, my guess is that most players are based on chips that are also used for CDROM and have full error correction by default.