Cd's to make a come back in the future?

I agree that CDs are unlikely to generate any nostalgia.  I was among that generation who experienced vinyl, eight track, cassette and then CD. And while nostalgia is often cited as an appeal toward vinyl, nostalgia really doesn't draw me to any media.

For me the appeal of CDs is as follows:

1. Real media that I own even if I cancel a streaming account.
2. Inexpensive. The least expensive medium you can own.
3. Extensive selection and availability.
4. Easy to find components to play them.
5. Even low end CDPs sound good and can be used as transports.
6. Can be ripped for all the convenience of streaming.
7. You can dive in deep with CDs with little risk. In other words, you can buy a lot of them for little money, get a good CDP, a great DAC and rip them all onto a HD. And if you decided to be done with CDs tomorrow you're out the cost of the CDP and the CDs. The rest you can still use.

I said:

"Even low end CDPs sound good and can be used as transports."  

@inna said:

"No way, totally wrong. Besides, transport is at least as important as dac, some people don't know it."

No, not wrong at all. As inexperienced as I am I have had the opportunity to listen to some good CDPs, some fair CDPs and some $14 CDPs. The $14 CDPs sound 'good'. Not as good, not fantastic, but certainly not off-putting or awful and the differences are often subtle.

We could argue all day about what 'good' means, but that was not really the point. The point is that in comparison with the other popular physical medium, vinyl, you don't have to spend tons of money to exploit the basic value of the media. In a recent vinyl thread a member was told that he might as well not even think about vinyl unless he's willing to spend a grand or more and to not even bother with a $350 TT.

A $350 CDP will do a reasonable job whereas conventional wisdom is that a $350 TT will not.

I think there is another element here. To the aspiring audiophile DACs, cables, transports, streamers,jitter  etc etc, especially the high dollar stuff, can be off-putting both in their complexity and cost but also in the wide range of opinions in regard to how to go about streaming, server set up and all that.

If I were to advise someone interested in dabbling in high end audio I would recommend starting with a good CD player and CDs. Simple. Relatively cheap. This will allow them to hear high end and get their feer wet and without someone telling them that SQ is awful through anything but a $10,000 DAC with $500 USB cables. From there they can get into servers, streaming, jitter management devices etc. as their interest level and SQ tastes dictate.

In other words, CDs are the cheapest, easiest way to get into hi-fi.

And not to beat a dead horse but for the frugal audiophile (an oxymoron if there ever was one) if you do the leg work you can get an extremely well engineered CD, e.g. Two Against Nature by Steely Dan (my reference CD) for $5. Hi res files are $15 and up and require a back-up strategy.

The point is not a nostalgia road trip or to create some mystical ritual like dropping a needle. Why would that be any more pleasurable than pressing a button or watching a CD tray slide open?

The point is that with a CD you _own_ great sounding media at a literal fraction of the cost of downloadable hi-res media and the component requirement is one decent CDP. Simple. Cheap. Easy and high quality. No other media really ticks those boxes.

"Goodbye clutter"

Well, except for the two drives,cables, wall warts etc. And to me, digital clutter (all things considered) is as bad a physical clutter. And to me a shelf of CDs is no more clutter than books.

"  The system will sound a whole lot better in a relatively empty room"

True. And for the serious audiophile just physically being in the room represents a conundrum.

My roommate in college had a Nakamichi dual tape deck (not the dragon). We were into cassettes in a big way. Saved our money for the highest quality tapes.

I don't have any of them now.

Listened to them in the car a lot and found that car cassette decks were hard on them.

Just like 8 track killed vinyl.

To me one of the problems facing HD Tracks in addition to high prices, often double the cost of the brand new CD, is that they do not 'keep' your file for you the way iTunes does. If you lose it, it is gone.

I know you back things like this up. And I do. But for real security, especially if you have a lot of money invested in purchased hi-res files you should haveoff site backup. No, its not that hard to do using someone's cloud service but for the premium you pay at HD Tracks you should be able to retrieve files from them. I'm sure there is some legal/market/copyright issue with that.

Of course our hard media (CDs, vinyl, tapes, etc) does not have offsite back up either. Your house burns and they're gone.......but if you've ripped them and are worried about that you could easily store them somewhere else.