What will become of my beloved CDs?

I'm not so sure about the hard disc thing. A DVD holds between 4 and 20 Gigabytes of information ... so if your collection was all in high resolution, than you might have 8,000 Gbytes, a substantial hard disk. Now as technology marches forward there might be such a device but then there is the issue of back-up. I for one will want some form of back-up so that when the hard-drive takes a dump I won't be downloading for ... well lets see with a 1 megabit per second data connection. Um 8 Tbytes would take 64 million seconds, only a little over 2 years. But maybe our high speed access will be better or maybe we won't want high resolution multi-channel audio.

Lots of unknowns but I think your collection won't be obsolete for a while (I hope so for my sake as well).

And you know opnions are just like something else ... everyone has one ... for what it's worth.

JW

The way things are going, the music biz will soon cut off any media that is bit-accesible. You and I are sitting on virtual master tapes! And as upsampling, etc. becomes more refined (and it will) your collection will only become more valuable (and better sounding). I'd not worry.

An article from NY Times regarding the current state of on-line classical music: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/arts/music/11KOZI.html

Hold on to those CDs man. Another twenty years or so and they will be all the rage. People will collect them and marvel at the sound quality such an old technology can bring. They will marvel at the life-like quality of the recordings. They will go to yard sales, garage sales, pawn shops, specialty shops and will have their brains implanted with tiny chips as a replacement for those E-bay auctions, but without the computer and net connection, and will be able to buy them, sight unseen, from clear around the globe. Hold on to that dream...

In the future, you won't own recordings at all. You'll subscribe to a service that allows you to download any music you want, at any resolution you want, any time you want.

As for your CDs, there will always be players around, but don't expect much of a market for vintage CDs the way there is (or was, since the market is changing) for vintage vinyl. There is nothing about an old CD that will make it more desirable than a download. (Excepting, of course, those inevitable rarities that aren't available for download.)

As for that hard drive, you can plug a 20-gig iPod into your car stereo already. However much disk space you need, you will have some day.