"Beat up?" Well, no. "Provide at least as good music as?" Yup. The best of even redbook CD digital now is good enough that the rest of the system including the room and speaker placement are more important than "silver discs vs. black", IMO. And if the point of the exercise is listening to lots of recent releases, well, I'll take CDs any day. Of course, with my front end I would say that, wouldn't I?