What will become of my beloved CDs?

uberwaltz

there ya go, pointing out the obvious......and I agree. Funny really that vinyl is STILL the standard to which all others are measured............All most people under 40 care about is portability. Few have ever been exposed to a  really good system, playing good music..........They have no idea and don't care.........You don't miss what you don't know about. Even funnier is that many of them will be downloading the newer hi-rez formats, listening to them on $50 ear buds, or budget desk top speakers and raving about how good it sounds............Funny and sad at the same time.............I must be getting old............OK, that's a given :)

Send them to me.

I agree with jafant. CD players will be around for a long time. Maybe like turntables these days. Irrelevant in bigger picture, but with enough of die-hard support to make them profitable in those low numbers. Something like 78s. Some turntables can still play them, but it is a very small group of people who may actually use it. And, when nobody is watching, I ask myself why would they use it anyway.

Eventually the codec to 'decode' CDs will be lost to history. It might be near impossible for some future civilization to ever actually decode a CD contents without the knowledge of how it was created. Reverse engineering a CD contents with no idea how (or what is on the disc) may be impossible. The encoding is incredibly complicated, and not in any way conceivable straight forward. So in some future hundreds of thousands of years from now. all those archeological silver disc finds may be an utter mystery to those future beings. Oddly... an LP could easily be decoded..