High-end CD players, and I emphasize "high-end", no, their days are not over and they will continue to be available because enough audiophiles with CD libraries will be willing to pay the premiums necessary to justify their manufacture in very small numbers. Likewise, the general market for triodes, turntables and SACD players collapsed years ago, but they continue to be manufactured in tiny numbers for very high-end implementations because there are several tens of thousands of people worldwide who still want such products and are willing to pay the big premiums necessary to render viable their very limited production.
Components for high-end two-channel playback are now essentially hand-made and in extremely small numbers, which explains why they tend to be so expensive. I know a number of people who run custom-made preamps and power amps, and I try to explain to them that the only difference between their components and mine, which are somewhat known brands, is that the manufacturers of my gear bothered to come up with names and logos for what they make - many well-known two-channel brands are often just people making things in their garages or basements after they get home from their day jobs. Some brands are 2 to 4 man operations with small facilities in industrial parks, but even that is the exception these days - there are very few Sonus Fabers and Mark Levinsons. High-end cables? Transparent, Kimber and Cardas make their own cables, but the typical brand is a guy designing on a computer who contracts out the manufacturing to companies like Belden.
So, yes, you'll always be able to find someone offering $7,500 CD players. In a nod to the push toward hard-drive storage, such players will feature digital inputs so that they can be run with outboard digital sources. Most of the cost will go to subsidize the expense of small manufacturing runs of critical sub-assemblies such as transports and lasers, and the R&D behind the analog output stages and custom algorithms in the converters. A $700 phono stage in 2011? It's $42 worth of parts and perhaps a machined faceplate - the rest is the substantial premium necessary to recoup R&D and generate manufacturer margin on a production run of a couple hundred units.
