Are CD players dead

Pettyofficer, I was only prognosticating, not advocating. I like CDs and SACDs, and vinyl, and even cassette tapes, and have a healthy number of each, along with some pretty respectable equipment for playing all of them.

But I have also watched the selection of CDS, and the places you can buy them in my city, shrinking faster than a cotton t-shirt in an overheated dryer. So my guess (but not my preference), is that pretty soon now the music companies will start to ask themselves "why are we still producing and shipping the round plastic disks?"

I think there is one significant difference between the fabled death of Vinyl and the supposed death of CDs. If Vinyl truly died, huge collections of LPs might be rendered useless - outrage! The music industry doesn’t have that concern with CD’s because they can be downloaded.

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Cd's and vinyl will live at least another 50 years because hard-core audiophiles will never give in to the inevitable changes. However, as a viable medium of choice for the general public, the cd has one foot in the grave and the other one on a banana peel. Do a little survey of people that you know that buy music that are not audiophiles, you'll find that cd's are passe and old technology. The overwhelming bulk of music is not bought by audiophiles. Cd's and vinyl will always have a place in the high end, but its days of mass market appeal are dwindling rapidly.

10-10-11: 77jovian
My brother is a university music professor. He made a CD compilation for his students and most had no device to play the CD.

The above quote is a harbinger of things to come, the younger generation could care less about a cd player, much less a cd. Digital players are constantly getting better, smaller and more portable.

NO . I put all my music on my Mac , but much prefer listening to CD's , in fact most of my audio friends that have setup music servers still prefer disc's .
The biggest audio store in my area says CD player sales are brisk .

why will "CD's live another 50 yrs"? I understand vinyl, it's a niche media to hold analog, but you don't phyiscally need CD's to playback the inferior 44.1 files of CD's. You can get that crap downloaded. Or, you can get the better HiRez files, downloaded. Why do you think companies will continue to produce the discs? It's an unnessary cost to distribute the music.

Plus, the DAC's in a deck, with few exceptions, are not in the same league as those in a stand alone DAC.