CD Dead??

I suspect massive storage devices, perhaps not rotating, and down loads with high resolution will displace cds at some point. Until recently I had no interest in servers as they all sounded like crap. At CES, I heard two that didn't-the Exemplar and the Blue Smoke. I bought an Exemplar and now face the task of loading it with my cds. Since it takes typically 30 minutes to do it right, this is not going to be easy and I am going to retain a sacd player for my 400 sacds and to play cds while I load the server.

Not dead but the glory days are gone. Downloads are the future. Apple sells 250k Ipods a day. I wonder if that many CD players are sold in a month.

>Are you going to carry around the server on your back with some headphones?

Definitely. A 160G hard-drive based ipod is about the size of a pack of cigarettes and holds about 270 uncompressed full-length CDs, perhaps 500 with lossless compression. A few hundred dollars will buy one from Apple.

Here's a board with 640G of flash memory, enough for 1000 uncompressed CDs, which has no moving parts and about the size of a CD.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/images/fusion31.jpg