mikenzb: Well things Are Changing We Dont Live In The 19th Century Any More

richms: I wouldn't count on CDs, I have several mid 80s-early 90's ones that don't play properly anymore, strange crap at the edges of it and pinprick like holes in the foil layer. I stopped buying abour 1996 so have no younger ones to compare it to.

richms: I wouldn't count on CDs, I have several mid 80s-early 90's ones that don't play properly anymore, strange crap at the edges of it and pinprick like holes in the foil layer. I stopped buying abour 1996 so have no younger ones to compare it to.

andrew027: My car has a six disc in-dash CD player that takes MP3 discs as well (no bluetooth or USB). Every few months I just burn another few MP3 discs and keep them loaded all the time. So the audio isn't reference quality but as the car isn't a quiet, perfectly set up listening environment then MP3 is fine.

I buy a lot of CDs - I'm a bit of a collector I suppose. There's still something satisfying about having the product, disc, album art, etc. in my hand. And as I invested thousands of dollars in CD players, amplifiers and speakers, why would I spoil that playing an inferior source (compressed MP3 files)?

And now that I've commented on some of the side notes in the thread, back to the original post: I still have a good quality CD player (a Sony ES series, about 10 years old), as well as a BD player. But these days, don't you think that the more people rely on one "universal" disc player (e.g. a PS3), the harder it is to find real quality separate components (e.g. CD players)? I mean, they're still out there, but my local Sony Style store hasn't had a decent CD player in stock for probaly over a year.

richms: The reason that noone really does high end cd players (outside the audiophool market) is that people have wised up that its not the player but the DAC that matters, and that is normally in their HT reciever and fed digitally from the source, so the only thing that matters about the source is how well it deals with inferior discs.

mm1352000: I've got a couple like that too. Who do you talk to, or is there a process?

Jaxson:
Utter crap.  With my expensive CD player you can really feel the extra warmth and clarity that you just don't get with any cheap CD player that is passing the same digital information to the amplifier.  To protect that information from outside interference I use a $400 monster interconnect cable too.  And also I find that having my receiver decode the HD audio tracks sounds substantially richer than having my player decode this and pass the same digital information across to my receiver.  Of course I use a $500 1m monster hdmi cable for this too, so I ensure the sonic accuracy completely and that just doesn't happen with cheap gear.