The CD player is dead.......

One way you can design a DAC to be immune to jitter is to ensure it can have the transport slaved to it. This is easier said than done from a design perspective. One company that does this is Lessloss. The have designed their DAC so that the CEC TL-51X transport can be slaved to it. The TL-51X has a clock input which is connected to the DAC's clock output. The digital cable is then removed from the jitter equation as it only has to perform the task of carrying the bits and not the additional task of synchronizing the clocks (where the transport clock is master and DAC clock is slave). This is where a good portion of jitter is introduced.

I own this combination and oddly enough I've decided to compare it in my system to a Resolution Audio Opus 21 player. As mentioned previously, a CDP should be able to offer a master clock arrangement due to having all the digital circuitry in one box. However, this is not always the case, there are some poorly designed CDPs out there.

If the Opus 21 gives me a sense that I can live with it. Then I would consider moving up to the Resolution Audio Cantata. This would give me a well designed CDP, with volume control, balanced operation, and the ability to take advantage of USB or Ethernet computer audio connectivity. For me that would provide the best of both worlds.

PO, I've no clue where you are getting your numbers. According to Nielsen Soundscan, there were 374 million CDs sold last year. Digital downloads accounted for 40% of the market.

That means CDs still represent the majority of music purchases.

While CD sales are trending downward and have been for many years, as long as people keep buying them, the factories will keep making them.

It seems you are determined to go all doom and gloom over something that hasn't happened yet. Yes, things are changing, but angst filled predictions about the future are probably more often wrong than they are right.

Rather than engage in projection, I'd recommend you relax with some Albeniz, perhaps played by Norbert Kraft. Very relaxing. And it's even available on CD.

I have a Bel canto cd2 transport, dac 3 vbs front end and so far, the cd 2 via the aes/ebu wireworld gold eclipse digital cable is the best sound from my dac, I have tried a laptop and the wadia ipod doc.

Mlsstl - 374 million CDs sold in 2009 is correct but it was 12.7% decrease from previous year. At the same time individual downloads increased by 8.3% to 1.3 billion. If you count per total number of songs then digital downloads represent only 40% but each individual download (or few) was likely bought instead of CD. Linn stopped making CDs in 2009 and I've heard rumors that biggest CD store Walmart might discontinue them.

CDs are way too expensive in my opinion. Making CD together with royalties cost in order of $1. Twentieth Century Fox was selling DVDs in China for equivalent of $2 admitting small profit (it explains region code).

While your additional detail is correct, I noted in my post that things had been trending down for many years. I believe the highest sales year for CD was 2000, 10 years ago.

The music industry is changing for a variety of factors. But it has been doing that for the past hundred years or more. I imagine the sheet music publishers were sad when their top-dog spot was overtaken by 78s.

For years, radio was the driver for music recording sales. Top 40 AM stations in the 1960s drove acts like the Beatles and Rolling Stones. That trend continued with FM radio in the 1970s and in the 1980s MTV was the driver with music videos.

Today, MTV is mainly concerned with reality shows, not music. Radio stations are a pale ghost of their former selves when it comes to music. An oldies station doesn't generate new album sales - how many copies of "A Hard Day's Night" does a person need? Re-releases aren't going to generate the sales volume needed.

We've also got both the legal and underground download market. We've got a fragmented music scene with endless genres appealing to various subsects of the market.

Keep in mind that teenagers drive the volume end of the CD market and they are not listening to albums. In a fashion, this is a return the the market of the 1950s and before when singles drove the music scene.

In short, things are changing, but they've always been changing. The industry will need to readjust to the change in the volume of CD units sold, but I don't think CDs will be going away for quite some time.