Are CD players dead

That's funny. It's had the same affect on me...and left me wishing that threads about the death of CD players were dead.

Good point on the not finding cd quality downloads. If that should ever break (read: if iTunes ever becomes cd quality 16/44) THEN things will take off like a rocket on the computer music side of things.

That of course assumes most of the people actually care if Apple does that!

Is the owner of the store an idiot btw?

i don't think so. i think the owner of the store is a salesman. nothing moves product like a sense of urgency. :)

Absolutely not. As with vinyl, there are people who prefer the experience and quality (whoever thought that something would make us nostalgic for CDs?) of the format.

I have played with all kinds of computer encoding formats, and no matter what (listening through Grado RS-1/RA-1 combo), it doesn't sound as good. Even lossless, which most people aren't going to use because of the space that a file requires.

This doesn't even take into account the complexities of full musical access. I am a huge fan of Japanoise bands (High Rise, Fushitsusha, Overhang Party, etc.). If I didn't have my CDs and companies that sell them, such as Forced Exposure, I'd be screwed.

I think that the person who said that is in the business of selling the "next big thing," and that's computer audio. I like the idea of it, of having a giant hard drive with your whole music collection on it. I don't like the necessary redundancy, and the fact that your entire collection can be wiped out by a computer failure or hard drive crash. So you have to back it up, then back up the back up the back up the back up.

Or you can have CDs on the shelf. No brainer for me.