Are Disc Players Dead?

Clouds may be the way to go but I hope they put enough silver iodine in them to keep them around. I can just imagine everything being on a cloud and then, poof! Where did it go? This is all in jest but I remember someone 'loosing' the entire 18th century in the original "Rollerball" movie. Everything was on a giant server and everyone had access to it but someone felt it best to forget the Enlightenment.

Cloud is useless when your internet connection goes down. And yes it happens.

Vinyl will always be around because to some, it represents the ultimate in sonic quality. It is a major pain to use, and very expensive these days to outfit with hardware (TT, RIAA phono preamp, and the LPs themselves). It has fallen down the priority scale because of the convenience factor of digitally based media.

I'm stuck at the CD stage myself, prefering CD discs to thumb drives or WiFi connections. I still like to be able to pull a jewel case and view the cover art, and still look at the concept of an "album" as a related sequence of sonic experiences. Not a digitally selected set of random top 40's hits. I have Direct TV music channels for that kind of listening, and I don't do it on my high end audio system.

Plus the direct digital route is fraught with other problems. Just go to the computeraudiophile site and read about sonic quality losses from digital files being sent from common PCs or Macs. Apparently lossless digital isn't as perfect as many would lead us to believe. Plus, ever have your computer go down when playing a sound file via USB? The resulting screech will tear your ears off.

I enjoy both my CDP/CDs AND my vinyl set-up. As far as vinyl is concerned, there seems to be quite a bit available on the web.

In my case, and perhaps the same for many others as well too, there's a great used LP store about 15 minutes from my house. I can pick up old box-sets for $8-$15, e.g., yesterday I enjoyed listening to Beethoven's 9th, H. Karajan conducting, Berlin Philharmonic, DG -- 2 record box set. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but the LP store that sold that box set to me does a great job of screening out LPs that are generally in very good to excellent condition.

OK, enough said about vinyl. The vinyl debate continues to rage on.

One last comment about digital. I agree with the posts above that embrace the view that "redbook" CD will be around for a while. So, I'm not inclined to sell my CDP or my CD collection just yet, not even for 99 cent a CD.

My concern about new digital formats is alluded to in some of the comments above. It seems that a popular format or media is now "Clouds." Other than the white puffy stuff I see in the sky, I haven't a clue what Cloud media/format is.

And that makes my point. IMHO, the recording and music distribution inductry needs to settle on a standard format. Even if I were to purchase a DAC today, it will do me no good if the DAC is not compatible with the latest cutting edge format in vogue, be it Clouds or whatever. But having said that, if the music industry would settle on a new hi-rez format that is superior to redbook CD, and the new format was the only game in town, then I would consider giving it a try.

That's my opinion, being somewhat of an old-head.

"Apparently lossless digital isn't as perfect as many would lead us to believe"

Files can be better than original CD. The reason for that is that CD player cannot read the same sector many times, playing in real time, thus interpolating data when scratches on CD are longer than 4mm (quits at 8mm). Digital file can be ripped using EAC or MAX as data files reading sectors many times until proper checksum is obtained.

This is not to say that the day of server-based systems that reliably provide as high SQ and reliability as CDP or Transport - DAC based systems is not coming. But, as Charles1dad points out, currently (no pun intended) they are just too "buggy" and too many audio manufacturers have rushed servers, streamers and USB Dac's out the door too quickly, in order to ride the wave. At least the early CDP's, while far from the apogee of SQ, played reliably. My Magnavox CDB 650 (or something like that), the first 16-bit CDP, still plays! I wasn't on the phone with Tech Support 5 times a day -- ever!

Believe me, I would love to use a server-based system and not have to elevate my corpus, get vertical, use my upper extremities, and actually pick out a CD to listen to in its organic entirety!

Neal