who needs a cd player anymore

Usarmyvet91, yes, I have tried the wadia and have listened to it in other systems as well. Wonderful product. But it is not the same as my Naim CDX2. It is convenient, the attributes you speak of in your initial post were about convenience, not sound quality or musical experience. I pick my music carefully. I am also a fan of the old idea of a well produced "Album", not just a bunch of individually picked songs. I will say though that I rarely will listen to music as background noise, when I listen, that is usually all I am doing and I pick my music carefully from a know library I have put together, so convenience is not all that important. Other people have other tastes, that is fine to. But the Ipod has just not caught on in my system. Great idea though.

Well 3000 songs is hardly alot of music in these circles and in fact is somewhat of a starter collection so when you get to 1000, 3000, or 10,000 cd's in your collection and look at expense of storage, risk of potential loss of data and give up holding your "baby's" while enjoying the info that many cd's contain (via a magnifying glass) then get back to us. I have looked into it from a disability angle and would like to try but even my 800cd library seems expensive to really do right and I dont want to give up the interaction of playing music on my gear, atleast not yet as I assume its gonna dumb it all down a bit.

chadnliz 3,000 songs of itunes plus music on one ipod touch. I never said anything about my cd collection which is around 5k i have been importing that via wav and apple lossless.

One thing that downloaders only will in time miss? That is a real, tangible piece of property to own and value. Yes, you may be able to pull up a play list on an lcd screen but you invariably have nothing real, just virtual details on a screen locked inside some hard drive. People will over time miss not having something real. Today many don't care because the download ideology is just the thing to fill up a hard drives with music track/titles. FINE! enjoy, but you will likely find in time that you are going to miss something, more desirable for humans, something human consumers like, PRIDE OF OWNERSHIP, physical property to value and even display and talk about and share with family and friends as they may view your CD's, LP's or tape collection. Looking up a play list on a lcd screen just isn't the same.

Next since many download only tracks and not complete albums they miss out on the meaning of the artists' albums which often are a snapshot of the artist or group in time. Imagine say only downloading "Money" and "Us and Them" off Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon. Imagine what the listener will miss by not having the whole album to listen to. Yes, one can and some do download whole albums but not as many as those who pick and choose only certain tracks.

If all your music is only on a hard drive and it fails you are left with a lot of mess to try to recreate the library you had on it. On top of that the time you needed to download anyways. Well if such effort floats your boat.

But trust me the CD, like the LP or tapes before will not fade way, too many people want a real product and too many will not be bothered to waste time just uploading and downloading music tracks.

I will always support the CD. iPods and the like are crap...