No, it was the inability to oversample given the technology of the day. Because the actual sampling happened at 44.1 KHz, you needed a brick wall filter to elim

No, it was the inability to oversample given the technology of the day. Because the actual sampling happened at 44.1 KHz, you needed a brick wall filter to eliminate any signals past 20 KHz before sampling in order to avoid aliasing. Analogue brick wall filters do horrible things to the phase of the signal, screwing up the time relationships between tones and overtones. It was several years before gentler filtering and sampling at higher frequencies, then downconvertig to 44.1 KHz, made CDs listenable at all on a decent system - long enough for there to be a considerable catalogue of awfulness, and for a lot of people to have made up their minds that CDs had to suck. ("The sound of the '80s" had little to do with, say, classical and jazz recordings, which were subject to the same sampling problems.)