The CD player is dead.......

Devilboy, the most on-target post of the whole thread. Maybe nobody told you though, LSD is dead... It has been replaced by HD video downloads.

Devilboy, aside from actually resembling your statement, I have some questions for you. Does your hard drive sound better than your cd player? Does your hard drive sound as good as your cd player? Do you not care about having physical media to hold in your hand or store on your shelf? Do you not worry even a little bit about your hard drive crashing? If your answer is yes to all of these questions then you are a Devil's advocate for cd sacrifice - and your cd player will be deader to you than a jewish son marrying gentile.

To date my answer to all the above is "No." Maybe when 24/96 downloads are varied and common, I will be a convert. Until then, I am still firmly entrenched in comb over land. Please pass the greasy kid stuff, Devilboy.

Devilboy, a more relevant subject line to me would be: "The 16/44.1 format is dead..." Maybe the answer is yes, but not in the direction I want. There are at least hundreds of millions of downloads each day at resolutions much lower than red book standards for use on iPods, iPhones, laptops and the like. For these people, clearly convenience trumps quality. This fact is polluting the recording and production arts, making recent popular recorded product so compromised and compressed that they sound like crap on high end systems. Very unfortunate.

As for the CD player, I have a bunch of music on my laptop, both downloads and music ripped from CD and stored in iTunes. I listen to this music at work on a modest system and DAC, and on the road through headphones - convenience eclipses quality in this case. I am waiting to replace my CD based home systems with HD based music server systems until higher resolution digital formats and hardware become much more common and affordable. I just don't see or hear the advantage at this point to recapitalize.

I have a close friend who is retired and has invested a lot of time to download his entire CD and LP collections to HD, and now has them all at his finger tips. Neat. To me it still doesn't sound any better or not even as good as his digital player or a good turntable. And now, he has invested much time and effort to lock his analog material into a digital resolution limited by the analog system and ADC used at the time to re-record it, an affront to the quest for the Absoulte Sound in my mind and major sacrifice to convenience.

The CD player may be receeding as the principal music format, but I think rumors of it's imenent and complete death, among audiophiles at least, are highly exagerated. And if it does die very quickly, it will likely be replaced in the mass market by source material and equipment in most cases that is of lower quality, not higher quality, than what we had before. When I can access popular and affordable download pipelines and the ubiquitous iPods/iPhones can routinely handle and play 24/96 or better resolution digital music, then the CD format can rest in peace in mind and closet.

What a discussion, 117 posts so far including this one. Here are the points I find most compelling on both sides:

The CD should not die, yet:

1. Owning and having access to physical media is attractive to many, with cover art, liner notes and a tactile sense of substance and ownership that digital files cannot provide - this may be more comforting to ludites and materialists than to those more comfortable being part of the "Matrix".

2. There is a huge standing inventory of CD's in peoples homes, new and used music stores, and public institutions like schools and libraries - the only current mass media form for millions of songs recorded from the 1990's and 2000's. In contrast CD-quality downloads are severly limited compared to the existing inventory of new and used CDs in the world.

3. There is a strong market for #2 above, and it provides access to reasonable quality digital music at a lower cost point and with resale value that is not currently available through Internet Downloads - or am I missing something here?

4. The CD player/disk system is simple to set up as a part of a HiFi system, if more effort to actually use, than well-executed HD or computer based servers (I am not talking using iTunes to load your iPod here, I am talking fully integrated remote controlled music servers).

5. No ripping of existing media required, put disk in and push play.

The CD is dead:

1. Music serves/DACs are theoretically not limited to 16/44.1 resolution, and can play anything from mp3's to 24/192 files (this is the best reason IMHO and all others pale in comparison)

2. iTunes and other music server software are convenient, immediate and complete all-in-one purchase, orgnaize and play solutions, and will absolutely kill in the cradle to grave music service when higher resolution downloads become cheaper and more widely available.

3. Downloading music from the Internet satisfies the human appetite for immediate gratification.

4. Who cares about the value of buying and selling used new and used music when you can just share all of your music files in networks for free (Dooh!), visit any college campus today, most kids don't even know HOW to buy music.

Clearly there are those in the industry who agree with Devilboy, Linn being among the first to quit making ANY CD players. In any case, quality CD players or at least optical disk drives will be around for a long time to access existing media for listening and ripping. I really don't have time to adopt now other than LoFi uses of iTunes, and in my mind the HiFi software applications, hardware and media are not yet mature enough for me to spend the money and make the time. They will be mature enough, but until then, the CD player and CD's are both very much alive at my house (and car, and office).