Indeed - the first CD players made by Philips, and maybe some others OEMd by them actually played back in _14 bit_ because a good 16 bit converter couldn't be made at a realistic price point. And the 'truncation' wasn't done gracefully on these players, to put it mildly! The 'brick wall filter' at 20khZ was implemented by a big, honking, ugly _analog_ low pass filter that had god-knows-how-much phase shift. Record companies just grabbed the "EQ master" which was equalized for LP cutting and transferred them to CD. Of course these sounded like crap. Microphones had a big peak of around 5-10 db at around 6-10khZ, again to make the sound register on LPs. Mix enough of these into stereo, and you get some pretty 'glarey', 'hard' and 'brittle' sound. This was covered up by LPs, but came through all too well on CD. Techniques now are much more natural.