The demise of the music CD inevitable?

The CD crashed and burned about 20 years ago when they started cutting back on dynamic range one supposes to save the industry from impending doom. For the last 10 years things have gotten a lot worse, with many popular CDs having virtually Zero dynamic range, relatively speaking. 

I agree that vinyl will outlast the compact disk.  A few years ago I stopped buying cds (except for sacds).  I ripped all the cds into my library and packed the discs away.  Much easier to handle and search for a song. With SOX upsampling to 176.4khz and using a good dac (with a low jitter clock), it actually sounds better than playing from the disc directly.  I still will jump to buy a vinyl record but can't do the same for cd.  Especially older bands that did not truly capture the full sound during tape/record analog to digital conversion onto compact disc.  

There is still a thriving niche market for audiophile cd’s with stores like Elusive disk, MOFI, Acoustic Sounds, Chesky ,CD Japan etc selling a wide variety of discs incl: DXD, XRCD24, K2HD, SACD, SHM, UHQCD, Ultra HDCD etc. Granted, audiophile cd’s are not cheap, but then again neither are audiophile lp’s.

Unlike those who have archived their cd collection onto a server, I still enjoy interacting with the media & spinning discs. And the sound, atleast through my Vitus SCD-025 Mk2 cdp, is wonderful!