CD players = dead?

Very true grannyring, USA is fad run society and Audio has become a fad operation as well .

A sad commentary, but true nonetheless. 

CD is not dead. People who say it is , never liked CD to begin with, and they never had a great CD based system.

With the release by Marantz a mainstream player recently of their Reference line CD/SACD player the SA10 that includes their proprietary transport mechanism designed as part of this product development program and proprietary software for 1-Bit processing upscaling all signals to DSD suggests that the cd format is alive and well as a niche technology. Clearly cd's are not going anywhere anytime soon. Of course Tower Records HMV and so on have been made redundant by streaming. Mass market watches movies and streams music. Still we have radio stations and new vinyl manufacturing facilities and technologies emerging. Premium brands like Linn have entered the streaming market too. It's fascinating because wired beats wireless for reliability yet convenience beats reliability! And discs are better quality than streaming yet streaming is far more popular as it is much more accessible and cheaper. CD's will remain a niche, and SACD and similar high quality discs another small niche. My understanding only.

With well over 6,000 CD's in my collection,  owning a top notch player is essential.  I've been perusing the marketplace quite a lot over the last 10 years and have witnessed with increasing frustration, the audio industry's growing marginalization of this piece of gear.  Not only is the rapidly diminishing number of audiophile quality machines of concern, but also the diminishing  quality of the design of some of these, my Audiolab 8300CD for example, (reflecting the increasing lack of commitment by some companies to this end of the market).