When I have seen people listing their systems lately

I ran into the same situation as mapman.  I had all my CD's ripped as wav.  Due to the non-existent tagging options in WAV, I was forced to manually add each CD into the windows media player database.  Basically rip a CD, load windows media player, add the new CD folder to the library, and use the lookup to "tag" the folder as an album.  

This worked fine once my collection was ripped.  But, what I was doing is storing the data in a database that only Windows Media Player could use instead of storing the data in the music files.

One day my boot/OS drive died on me which was no big deal since my music files were on another drive.  I got a replacement drive, and re-loaded windows.  I then launched Windows Media Player and added my music folder to the library.  Instead having a thousand nice and neat albums, I had a single album with 15K songs.  When my boot drive died, I also lost the Windows Media Player database.   All the work was lost.

I think stand alone CD Players are mostly dead, but I don't think the Redbook CD format is dead.  I differentiate CD players from universal disc players that player SACD, CD, DVD, and Blu Ray.

My old standby player was a Rotel RCD-950.  Having an IT background, I always have more computers laying around than I need.  Back in 2009 I decided to rip a bunch of music using EAC into wav, and compare the sound quality to my CD Player.  My PC was connected to my Rotel RSX-1056 receiver with an optical digital cable, and my CD was connected with the usual analog RCA cables.

Had the same song playing on both systems and synced up.  I could barely tell any difference between the two when switching between sources.  I then brought my wife in and had her listen as I switched back in forth.  On a few different songs she thought the PC source sounded better.  At that point I ripped all my Cd's to files and have never looked back.

To this day I still buy some CD's. They are simply used to rip into FLAC, and then are put in storage out of sight.  Personally, I can never see going back to having racks of CD's in the living room, plucking a CD from the shelf, putting the disc in the player, and pressing play.  I play vinyl when I want that level of interaction.  I have purchased a few high def music files if I'm sure they were not upsampled from redbook, but I still buy lots of CD's.