Are CD players dead

Pettyofficer: Very interesting and scary theory. As nice as it is, I don't necessarily need hi-rez. In fact, 100% of my music is redbook. One would hope that if cds are abolished, sites would still have uncompressed material for sale. One would hope........

hi phaelon:

if you're right, what will replace the cd player if hi-rez doesn't take off ?? possibly blue ray players ??

Slow down and get a grip Petty. I promise you that we will not be stuck with MP3 as music’s highest form of a playback medium. Force yourself to remember who we are - we will keep tinkering with digital reproduction, and whatever comes after that, until it truly becomes indistinguishable from the origin. I’m not saying that this is going to happen any time soon. I’m just saying that on the journey of processed music, we haven’t even left the harbor.

I do understand your concern about the mass acceptance of MP3. I felt the same way about fast food milk shakes. But old fashion shakes are still available if not as convenient as the processed kind.

Live music is still appreciated. And as long as that is so, there will be a stick buy which we can measure any format change they try to sell us.

Hi Mrtennis,
Just to be clear, I’m not claiming any type of clairvoyance. I’m just trying to resist getting as upset as Petty. Regarding Hi-Rez, I just can’t imagine them screwing it up so badly that it’s totally abandoned. To me, that would be like abandoning Hi-def TV. I don’t know why it’s so, but it just doesn’t seem like the movers and shakers of audio can ever come to consensus on anything. You want to connect your Hi-Def TV, no problem - HDMI, that’s it. How many different connection alternatives are there for a DAC.

I suspect at some point we will see more downloadable content from amazon and others at CD Redbook resolution.

Practically though, the time involved to download even that much less high res album length content would not appeal to most. It will take some time to get to the point where bandwidth from homes to commercial sites is large enough to download those quantities of data quickly. So in teh meantime, CDs will continue to linger and serve a purpose, even if not necessarily thrive.