Are CD players dead

With the purchase price of downloaded music being close to the cost of buying a hard disk CD that was produced in a brick and mortar manufacturing facility, it should be no surprise to anyone why the music industry is pushing this IMO flawed media.

Click you way to the New CD Releases section of the Barnes & Noble website and you’ll find that every week, close to a thousand new CD’s are released.

It seems sensible to me that any time you can eliminate a mechanical function in an electronic medium, it’s a good thing. No, it’s not dead, but dead man walking.

My brother is a university music professor. He made a CD compilation for his students and most had no device to play the CD.

Well I don't know if it is truly dead but I haven't used mine for over a year.

Reports of the death of redbook cd's are premature.

CD's will survive for quite a while in the market space between availability, cost and convenience. By title, CD sales still reign supreme, correct? That will not last forever, but I regularly use CD, lp, and computer downloads, and assume I am not alone. I like liner notes that I can hold in my hand, and physicval media, whether lp or cd/sacd, has some appeal to me.

I love the convenience of the whole iTunes experience, but not the sound quality. I love the sound of HD digital downloads, but not the lack of availability of content or the clunky interfaces (hardware, software or retail - aside: I will lavish effort over all things vinyl, but can't be bothered with worrying about asynchronus versus non-asynchronus USB conversion etc., go figure). My feeling is that once a HD format is combined with a front end that is as simple to use and widely available as iTunes, then I will embrace electronic media as my first preference, but will continue to spin lps and cd for quite a while.

I suggest you download a free copy of iTunes onto your computer and play with it for a while with a pair of cheap headphones as a gateway drug. If you are interested in going further, then you can move onto the hard stuff - stand alone DAC, boutique playback software, HD downloads, and all that. A good DAC can make a modest cdp sound pretty good too if the player has a decent transport mechanism...

The CD is dead, long live the CD!