The CD player is dead.......


I am still waiting for someone to explain why a cd player is superior to storing music on a hard drive and going to a dac. Probably because you all know it's not.

Every cd player has a dac. I'll repeat that. Every cd player has a dac. So if you can store the ones and zeros on a hard drive and use error correction JUST ONCE and then go to a high end dac, isn't that better than relying on a cd player's "on the fly" jitter correction every time you play a song? Not to mention the convenience of having hundreds of albums at your fingertips via an itouch remote.

If cd player sales drop, then will cd sales drop as well, making less music available to rip to a hard drive?
Maybe, but there's the internet to give us all the selection we've been missing. Has anyone been in a Barnes and Noble or Borders lately? The music section has shown shrinkage worse than George Costanza! This is an obvious sign of things to come.....

People still embracing cd players are the "comb over" equivalent of bald men. They're trying to hold on to something that isn't there and they know will ultimately vanish one day.

I say sell your cd players and embrace the future of things to come. Don't do the digital "comb over".
devilboy
I would still rather operate a high-end CD player,
than a computer based music system. It just feels better.
Devilboy,
To me it looks like you want to show off your new Weiss DAC!! Gimme a break from the computers...it's my profession. Don't want them when I relax!!!!
Devilboy,

I have had a Levinson No. 31 and Sony SCD1 amoung other players, so I feel qualified to comment and think my hard drive sounds just as good.

Now to be fair, it's more fun (albeit less convenient) and a more luxurious experience to load discs into an exotic, expensive and mysterious device, than to click on a piece of plastic, in the same way that it's more fun to go 100 MPH in a Ferrari than it is in a Nissan.

The real reason the "comb over" persists, however, is because no one has yet been ingenious enough to figure out how to put a $500 computer in a fancy aluminum chassis and get neurotic audiophiles like myself to shell out $10,000 for it.

As to the high margin buggy whip salesmen and/or enthusiasts above warning of the dangers of hard drives - do they not understand that hard drives can be backed up??

I have been using computers since 1982, and I have never experienced a hard drive failure. I am now typing on a Lenovo netbook, which has been on about 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 3 years and also has yet to fail. But I back it up regularly, so who cares if it does fail?

Further to defending things which are supposedly horribly unreliable and no substitute for overpriced audiophile gear, I have had a Behringer DEC2496 and 3 Behringer A500s turned on all day, every day, for about 3 years now. They are all working perfectly and going strong.

Vinyl may not be dead, but yes, I would agree the CD player is dead.