Looking for a CD Player

If you’re tired of getting up and down and up and down, I second or third the vote for streaming. The $3000 you might spend on a new CD player will buy you over 15 years of CD-quality streaming music. I have a nice CD player in a pretty darn good system but Qobuz easily matches or beats it. Plus you can expand a streaming service to any room in the house for very little money. I read a review of a new album, go to Qobuz and there it is, ready to listen to.

If you want it all--CD, streamer, DAC--in one package, check out the Black Ice CD/Streamer/DAC. A friend bought one to symplify his system of separates, and he loves it. It’s also opened up the world of streaming to him.

https://blackiceaudio.com/daccd-players/p/black-ice-fusion-wifi-dac-transport

@jayctoy 

You don't need a "computer" to stream.  Decent, small, self-contained streamers can be had for less than $500.  It's a wonderful way to listen to an enormous variety of music for the price of a single CD every month.  And anyway, the Black Ice unit I mentioned covers all the bases--a CD player, an excellent DAC, AND a high-quality streamer thrown in for good measure.  The OP gets what he wants plus the opportunity to investigate a new format.

As for artist compensation, well, that horse has left the barn.  As of 2022, CDs accounted for less than 3% of music sales.  If an elite classical label like Hyperion can finally hop on the streaming wagon, as they did last year, there must be a reason.

...and if my 72 yo, computer illiterate audiophile friend can work the Black Ice streamer (which he can, thanks to excellent personal assistance from Black Ice), anyone can.

@jayctoy Great!!

Two other things I'll mention about streaming:

1) I've discovered artists on Qobuz who I would never have heard of otherwise, and who would not have a gotten a cent from me in CD sales;

2) Streaming is vastly less wasteful than CDs, which use fossil fuels and cannot be recycled.

@nonoise 

Honestly, nothing you have said there undermines my point: CDs account for a fraction of music sales these days.  They are environmentally harmful to manufacture and cannot be recycled.  And what difference does it make WHO buys streaming music, or how they listen to it?  Talk about a red herring! ;-)  Let the "kids" buy whatever they want.  My daughter loves Spotify.  So what?  In a single week I can access more high-quality, hi-resolution music suited to my tastes than I could afford to purchase on CD in an entire year.  Plus I can share new discoveries with friends with a simple text message.  This month alone a fellow jazz lover who lives 3,000 miles away introduced me to six artists I was unfamiliar with.  I can check them out and enjoy them (or reject them) at no extra cost.  I'm currently reading a biography of Charles Ives.  I can listen to almost every piece referenced in the book in excellent sound quality without spending a cent on CDs.  And if I find something I want to be sure I can preserve in my collection, I can BUY it and store it on a hard drive.

@richardbrand

Well, you can certainly make the choices you want to make. I consult for a company that produces digital media, both hard and soft, and over the past 15 years I’ve witnessed hundreds of palletes of returned CDs headed for the landfill, because nobody wants them. And that's just one very small company.  Fortunately that practice is on the decline. And I could be wrong, but I don’t believe CDs count as "sequestered carbon," at least not at the moment. There are efforts to turn sequestered CO2 into plastics, but as far as I know no currently manufactured CDs are made that way.

As for the internet, there’s another horse out of the barn. Might as well object to radio or TV.