Are CD players dead

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.

This subject is getting a lot of attention, just look at the responses here. Cds' aren't dead or dying anytime soon but with hard disk based music playback getting so good it is easy to see why some think that it's the only way to go.
Once some of the larger record lables start offering high resolution downloads of big chunks of their music libraries it will start to tip in favor of downloads for audiophiles for the simple reason that it's better. A 24/96 file of something that is also on a cd is going to sound better.

That simple.

I honestly don't think that anyone that isn't looking into computer audio is behind right now though. Great cd players still sound great, lot's of cds being produced, LOT'S of used cds out there so it has legs as far as being relevant for quite some time. But.....when everything is working and you have a high resolution recording playing back through a well thought out hard drive based sytem it is very hard to look back.