Was it not the sound of the 80s that was responsible for that? (See "In The Air Tonight".)

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.)

It applied to most any type of music on early CDs. They seemed to just really do badly converting it from tape to CD, but improved a great deal as time went on.