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Are these completely obsolete? It seems that everybody have an MP3 player of some kind. As a matter of fact, my mom wanted a CD player for some audio books she found, and we had a hard time getting one. I personally don't buy CDs any more, and when I get one is just to upload it on my iPod. How about you?
CD's are not obsolete. CD's are required to make FLAC files. MP3 just doesn't sound good to me anymore. The compression is always there, even when you think it's being modeled accurately, it isn't. Basically an album has to be pretty flat at 20-22Khz and you have to manually turn filtering off on an MP3 encoder to keep the very top end. The thing is that it compresses when the level gets low enough and not when it isn't present, if that makes sense. So a light guitar piece will see half it's signal disappear until something loud like a crash symbol forces the algorithm to allow up to 22Khz. WAV files don't do that. The guitar would be there in full force from the beginning. Imagine if in the studio they used crappy noisy mics for everything except the mics on the cymbals. That is the absolute best case scenario for MP3. They don't do that though. They record using all the bandwidth they can even past the limitations of CD and when it gets mixed everything is still there. Going down to an MP3 is like deciding anything that isn't loud as hell should be cut. Not rolled off, but just eliminated. Who knows what is going on in the mids and the really important frequencies. The screenshots of the frequency analyzer are shocking enough. If you go out and buy a Panasonic DVD Player, then you'll have HDCD which we can't really duplicate all that well on a computer without flat out rerecording the entire album and chopping it up in a wave editor. A LOT of Cd's are HDCD. I was pretty surprised how few of them advertised it when the light came on.
I am glad they are not obsolete. I have thousands of them, and I don't want to part with them. I like touching them and looking at their art work. I do have an MP3 player, but I like my CD player more.
CD players are still very much alive, but nobody knows it because they're sold only by high end audio manufacturers for prices starting at about $300 and running as high as $10K and more. The CD format is far from perfect, but it sounds much better than an MP3 file when played on a high resolution sound system. Many people still listen to CD's, but mostly in their cars. Almost nobody I know has a good sounding audio system in their home, and the music they listen to on computer speakers, Wal Mart boomboxes and Ipod earbuds sounds so bad that it's easy to understand why nobody actually sits and listens to music anymore. I recommend an inexpensive DVD player for my friends who want to set up low budget music systems in their home. DVD players will play CD's too. I recently bought a $40 Toshiba (which included a hdmi cable) that sounds better than my first real CD player, a Sony I paid $400 for in the 1980's. http://www.conns.com/tv-and-video/dvd-players/toshiba-sdk1000-dvd-player.html
No, CDs are still very much in use among people who prefer them over mp3s. Most people do use mp3s, though, just because they are more convenient and they aren't paying attention to sound degradation.
Hi All, CDs are still alive, but perhaps not thriving as well as before. I use an OPPO 83SE Blue Ray player for them. For those not familiar with it, it is an upgrade of the standard one and aimed directly at high quality audio. Even Stereophile liked it. It has some quirks, like always remembering where you stopped on a disk (I don't know how many it remembers, but it is a lot) and wants to restart there. But the sound is wonderful. It does a great job with high rate sampled (320K ) MP3s on a hard drive through its USB input as well. In the worst case you can always watch DVDs although mine is not connected to any TV. That is because of noise getting into the audio via the CATV and other video equipment (good topic for another day). I too like to touch the disks, but that may be old fashioned. Stored digital music is really getting pretty good and can certainly hold its own to CDs. Ask Sony - they just closed a CD plant because of the loss of sales to on-line stuff.