The demise of the music CD inevitable?

but still they skip and can’t be played on quite large number of CD players which means their life is over. I don’t care for what reason, but it’s over.

This is not right, you can re-polish them yourself to get the scratches out use a coarse cutting compound then a fine polishing one.

Or take them to the video rental store and for a couple of bucks each they’ll put them on the dvd rental polishing machine which brings them up like new again in 5 mins.

Mind you there is an is a limit to the amount of times you can do this, unless you give them to the dog to play with every week, you can do it at least 3 or 4 times. I think twice for anyone’s life will do if you treat them right.

PS: Never scratch the label side, as it is the silver layer, scratch that and all you have then is a clear see through piece of plasitic.

Cheers George

I've got your point George, but I don't even come close dealing with scratched CDs and still they get returned in particular 80's CDs that skip on certain players. The buyer usually claims that the rest of CDs he's got do not skip. Therefore I removed all 80's CDs from the online sale. 1992 or newer..

For the first time I downloaded a free demonstration recording 96/24 file from ProStudioMasters. It sounded fantastic, and to my ears, much better than lower resolution CD. The only problem I see with high res downloads is the huge amount of Disk Space they take, I would need to find a large SSD dedicated to audio. With downloads however, my collection would be portable. This in itself is another reason the CD is just not viable for me anymore, yes, a hard drive may cough up a hairball and you could loose your collection, but high res downloads are a better sounding solution and they don't end up lost, scratched, in the wrong case, etc. Adding pain to injury, with my TIDAL streaming App, most of what I found on the download site was available to stream. I mean really, I'm finding it very hard now to justify any future CD purchase, it is in effect, obsolete.  

I buy GOLD CDR's. They say they will last 100 years! Let's discuss this again in 2116! Joe

Why not they say they've got cure for cancer and AIDS so who knows maybe ones that know the cure get waterboarded or ironed and reveal the secret after all?