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Are CD Players an endangered species? / Am I too old?

Fast_Eddie said:
That very much depends on how old the older player is. I can tell you that a "high end" cd player from the mid 80s that cost a ton of cash can't keep up with a Sony Diskman from the mid 90s. A Sony DVD Player from the mid 2000s will walk over the Diskman. The Toshibas sound better than a Sony DVD player. There is a lot of difference in this "low end". I've heard one very nice high end modern CD player - I think a Rotel - and it was clearly much better than my Toshiba.
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Do yourself a favor and listen to a TOTL Yamaha CD player from the late '80's.
 
I don't think standalone CD players are going away. However, the market has changed....there're very few single-disc CD player marketed in the US nowadays. It's now changers and almost every mainstream manufacturer market a pure audio changer....Harman Kardon, Denon, Yamaha, Sony, Pioneer, Marantz, TEAC, Onkyo, Sherwood, etc. As for single-disc players, just based on memory, TEAC, Marantz and Onkyo still market such players.

It's just the store you went to....shop on the 'net.
 
CDP are indeed on their way toward extinction, Yamaha has taken all their high end CDP off their list, so have various others, the sad fact is that Yamaha took away their excellent Pro Bit DAC as well, the one they use in their SACD player can't hold a candle to the Pro Bit sadly.
 
A few months ago I picked up some blank CDr's by Verbatim that look like 45rpm records. I'm thinking: "Wow, sooo cool! I'll give a pack to my 17 year old daughter, she'll really dig them!".

So I did. As she was texting on her phone while instant-messaging on the PC: "Daaaad...I don't use CD's anymore."

Ouch

Rick
 
At lot of good observations from you all. One of the most interesting things to me about the experience was that although the store did have CD players, the two salesmen did not know where they were or what they were.
 
About two months ago I replaced the CD player in my office system with a Squeezebox. Now all my CDs are stored on a hard drive and are transferred to the Squeezebox via a wireless network. It sounds just as good as the CD player it replaced and is much more versatile. It plays Sirius Satellite Radio (or XM), streams internet radio, gets sports scores and stock quotes. It even displays the weather report.

New CDs I purchase are ripped to the hard drive and then just put away for safe keeping. Of course you can also purchase the music via downloads from the internet. IMO, it's just a matter of time before this technolgy is adapted to video (if it hasn't already). CD and DVD players will be a thing of the past.
 
Here's another angle...

CD: 5"D. SD card: about 1" x 3/4".

CD: 700MB. SD card: 4GB

Some automotive stereos are being manufactured with SD card slots.

At Christmas I bought an Edirol R-09 field recorder to replace my portable Sony Walkman MD recorder. It has built in stereo mics, records in 24 bit wav at a 48khz sampling rate. And at other rates down to 44khp MP3 at 64kbps. At 360kbps in MP3 I get over 17 hours of recording on a 2GB SD card. At 44khz/16bit WAV I get 3 hours.

And you can record directly from your hard drive to the SD card, title all your selections, and play it in your car.

I'm a devoted MD user, I find it the Ideal medium for my purposes. But it's fading away.

Maybe CD is fading away, too. It was tough to make the transition from R2R to cassette. Then from cassette to CD. Will it be from CD to SD? (Have you seen the mind-SD cards? They're less than half the size of an SD card and hold as much data.)

I left out MD because it 'doesn't count'.

anyway, there's my angle on the downsizing of media.

Rick
 
The ipod is killing old school storage devices like cds.

When cds were new, storage (i.e. hard drives) were VERY expensive. Now that you can buy a good 500 gig drive for roughly $150, I'm not sure what the reason is to have a cd player anymore since there is a finite quantity of information on a cd. Once you download it to a more convenient storage unit - like a network drive - there is zero reason to download it a second time.

There's not much market room to sell cd players between people who prefer mp3s on their ipods and high end people who have networked storage devices with RAID.
 
If CD Players are on the endangered list as an increasingly obsolete item and disappearing from stores, presumably demand is dwindling and prices might be falling soon on them. To draw an analogy, there were times when even high-end TTs could be snapped up cheaply, when a lot of tube gear was "trash", and evem high-end cassette players are relatively cheap today.

There might be a time soon when when it will make sense to grab a few high-end examples of CD players, assuming one wants to bother owning/using them in the future, instead of following the crowd and dumping them for multi-disk players, iPods and hard disk servers.

Which models are the best ones to look for, if/when that happens? Which 5 or 10 or 20 dedicated CD-players should be on the "most wanted" list, and do you think they will ever get really cheap, or will people with a lot invested in CD collections and gear collectors always keep their prices up?

Just trying to think ahead here...
 
Good luck to you, here goes my list:

Yamaha CDX-993, CDX-2000, CDX-5000, CDX-10000, CDX-1050/1060
Accuphase DP70V. SONY XDP-555/777ES any Pioneer Elite updide down platter CDPs, make excellent transport, IMHO sadly Pioneer never made a DAC that appealed to me.
 
I think the high end is abandoning CDPs as well, in favor of universal players like the McIntosh 871 and Ayre C-5xe, both of which outperform all but a handful of dedicated CDPs.

Having just bought a Cambridge 840C for my office, and it having held it's own in the DAC comparison at the Fest, and now sounds even better that it's burned in for a while, I'm in complete agreement that to buy a CDP today, Cambridge is a good way to go. There are others, like Rega, etc., but in the long run, I think the universal players will win out, because their upsampling DACs are easier to make sound good and their transports do a better job of data retrieval and jitter reduction.

Now, if I could get predictions like this right with any regularity, I wouldn't have to work, ya know?
 
Tapehead47 said:
A few months ago I picked up some blank CDr's by Verbatim that look like 45rpm records. I'm thinking: "Wow, sooo cool! I'll give a pack to my 17 year old daughter, she'll really dig them!".

So I did. As she was texting on her phone while instant-messaging on the PC: "Daaaad...I don't use CD's anymore."
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Tell her to "...give 'em back here, I'll use 'em."

PS I like those too, plus they're black (mostly).
 
Awhile back I went to Best Buy looking for a component CD player and I got the same kind of looks that you guys got. Nobody seemed to have any idea what I was talking about.

I've bought several single-CD players over the last couple of years: two Teacs from J&R Music World and three Marantz' from Music Direct. All are still working ok.
 
tcdriver said:
1. Are stand alone CD players a soon to be an endangered species?

2. Are people who use CD players soon to be an endangered species?
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The answer is yes and yes, judging from the amount of CDP's I've gotten cheap in the past year. People can play their "outdated cd's on the computer and DVD surround system. Burn iPod tunes - don't need cd's now.
So now I guess i better be on the hunt so i can have a stockpile of CDP's available so I can listen to a quality playback system for years to come. Everyone's going A/V HT. Stuff's cheap and small nowdays.
 
My present Marantz is 9 years old and I'm going to be in deep trouble when it dies and I have to look for a replacement. I'm just not crazy about using a DVD player for CDs.
 
RichPA said:
As a mass market phenomenon, yes. For hobbyists/enthusiasts, I don't think so, not for a long time.
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I agree totally about the mass market. As for hobbyists, it will probably depend upon whether there's a large enough market for companies like Philips or Sony to keep producing CD transports for OEM use. I'm not sure that's going to be true for much longer.

There will probably be a switch to using DVD transports, so the hobbyist/enthusiast will still be able to buy a CD player.

Personally, I have an outboard DAC, so I don't really care what they do as long as I can buy something with a digital out. Right now I use a $59 Philips DVD player that works just fine. (If it can handle video, it can surely handle CD audio.)
 
OvenMaster said:
My present Marantz is 9 years old and I'm going to be in deep trouble when it dies and I have to look for a replacement. I'm just not crazy about using a DVD player for CDs.
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I think TEAC still makes a single-disk CD player. There were also a few inexpensive CD changers the last time I looked too.

From there you get into around the US$300 price range and it goes up into the stratosphere from there.

Why don't you like using a DVD player for CDs?
 
Doctordirt said:
The answer is yes and yes, judging from the amount of CDP's I've gotten cheap in the past year. People can play their "outdated cd's on the computer and DVD surround system. Burn iPod tunes - don't need cd's now.
So now I guess i better be on the hunt so i can have a stockpile of CDP's available so I can listen to a quality playback system for years to come. Everyone's going A/V HT. Stuff's cheap and small nowdays.
Click to expand...

What is making more and more sense is something like the Slim Devices Squeezebox.

You can rip perfect copies of your CDs to FLAC files or another lossless format. Store the files on your hard drive and them stream it to your Squeezebox and play it on your stereo system. No more need for a standalone CD player and you can instantly access anything in your collection without even getting up from your chair. :)

If you don't like the DAC in the Squeezebox, there are plenty of people modifying them, or you can just go to an outboard DAC.
 
stuartk said:
What is making more and more sense is something like the Slim Devices Squeezebox.

You can rip perfect copies of your CDs to FLAC files or another lossless format. Store the files on your hard drive and them stream it to your Squeezebox and play it on your stereo system. No more need for a standalone CD player and you can instantly access anything in your collection without even getting up from your chair. :)

If you don't like the DAC in the Squeezebox, there are plenty of people modifying them, or you can just go to an outboard DAC.
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What he said
 
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