Are CD players dead

Yep. ;)

Goodness, such drama. "Left behind". You store owner makes it sound like the Rapture. There are literally tens of millions of CDs out there, owned by people who will, like LP owners, keep and sell and trade them for years to come. So CD players are going to be with us for very long time yet.

On the other hand, I suspect that new CD manufacture is
going to go the way of new LP manufacture. It won't disappear completely, but it will become a specialty market some day. I think the day will soon be upon us when most new music is only distributed via the Internet - you may choose to copy it on CD, but you will acquire it only in the form of software. So I think it is wise to start to become familiar with what your store owner calls "computer audio".

Pettyofficer, I was only prognosticating, not advocating. I like CDs and SACDs, and vinyl, and even cassette tapes, and have a healthy number of each, along with some pretty respectable equipment for playing all of them.

But I have also watched the selection of CDS, and the places you can buy them in my city, shrinking faster than a cotton t-shirt in an overheated dryer. So my guess (but not my preference), is that pretty soon now the music companies will start to ask themselves "why are we still producing and shipping the round plastic disks?"