gofar99 Messages: 1932 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
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.