CD players = dead?

CD, DVD, Blue-Ray, 4K disc player will all be dead. Everything is on the cloud.

I think many people had thought (myself included) that turntables were obsolete when CDs and players came out. I bought an early Phillips unit around 1984 in Germany. But CD players kept improving as record albums became more scarce. Nowadays many. many audiophiles will swear by the superiority of analog over digital.

I don’t think CD players are obsolete at all....

As bdp24 said, if you have discs you need something to play them on. Yes, you can get digital many ways, but even though this is so, does not mean that CD players are dead. Oppo just released their two newest players, T+A has released several very good players recently, and there are still a number of good or very good players being manufactured. They will be around for a long time to come. And if manufacturers are smart, they'll take a hint and implement a player with a transport, DAC, and other digital capabilities including streaming. Not everyone wants to have a bunch of boxes in their systems and the resulting bunch of cables.

I used to think about ripping all my CDs, but now there is streaming, I've totally forgotten about that. I can stream when I want to stream and play CDs when I have the urge.  Long live the CD player.... but please put more features in them so they do more than just play a CD.

It’s almost the vinyl story repeating itself all over again.

Consumer oriented audio companies may drop them, but esoteric brands will continue to produce them - cos those with collections will need to play them

But I do see the distant future marketplace being CD free.
- I haven’t bought a CD in ages,
- but I download digital albums and I still buy vinyl.

Are streaming services that way of the future? Probably

Vinyl seems to be re-surging - due in part to the cover art and the included liner notes, which you can actually read without a magnifying glass. I never rear the notes in a CD.

Perhaps someone will include liner notes with downloads someday?

But is the vinyl resurgence due to superior sound quality or is it more a younger generation "fad" that will lose it's appeal very soon? 

Personally - I find I actually put "vinyl" on to listen to it - i.e. the entire album, whereas I tend put digital music on to provide background music because of it's "convenience"

Who knows what the future will bring :-)

Regards...

Vinyl is big with millennials right now, but this is just a fad and deemed to be the cool thing to do. Nothing to do with a desire for better sound quality. It will pass. All serious digital innovation is not going towards CD players. New models may come out as some high end companies seek to milk a product category in the decline stage of its life cycle.