Have you looked at high end turntable prices lately and that format is supposedly dead and buried. I actually wasn't aware that Walwart was the bellwether of the industry, all of hi-fi marketing is going to the internet anyway. One of the rules of marketing is the price goes up as the market contracts, the ultra high end illustrates this very well. There is no current replacement for CD, computer audio requires considerable expertise and commitment of time and resources and will never , in its present form, replace CD. God knows I would like a superior replacement myself but as the entertainment industry keeps illustrating that they can't find their marketing posterior with both hands I don't expect to see one in my life time.
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Missioncoonery...is right in the sense that overall CD sales are declining year-on-year at the expense of MP3 sales and the iPod. That is certainly true at the mass market level. Remember though that our crazy hobby is a nitche market and to us the first priority is to squeeze every additional ounce of performance from whatever format we are using (CD, SACD, LP, digital downloads, etc...). We are also participating though in the overall trend of moving away from the optical disc to PC-/music server-based transports. One need only look at how many new USB DACs (whether standalone or integrated in CD players) are being featured at CES over the past couple of years and you may ask the question legitimately as to whether CD players as transports are going to be less prevalent than PC-based transports 5 years from now even in our niche end of the market. Here is an editorial on this at Soundstage.com that ponders these questions: http://www.soundstage.com/editorial.shtml Enjoy |
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