CD players = dead?


From an audiophile, sound quality perspective are CD players obsolete? Can a CD player offer better performance than an audio server / streamer? 
madavid0
ok so cd goes away ... where do you gt your music? HDtracks or some other site that will sell you a copy of a piece of music you had on cd for more money because its digital . so you have to get/buy a digital player
(Jriver or ammarra) are they better ?
and on it goes -- what goes round comes round.
you think of how many formats you've had... records that you recorded because of limited play quality onto tape
then comes cd and you buy a lot of the music again
now digital copies
how many times have you bought Led Zeppelin or the Beatles or the who?
There is no escape. CDs are very compressed, now more than ever. Now vinyl is very compressed. You can’t play vinyl on iPods! Hel-loo! What are they thinking?! And even SACD and Blu Ray. Gasp! AND hi res downloads! Double gasp!
geoffkait, do you mean that new music on CD is more compressed than before or that new releases of old music (say, 60's, 70's, 80's) is more compressed than previous CD releases? 
@kalali
Great question. I find with some older artists like my favorite, Van Morrison, that my ripped collection is deeper than Tidal. This will vary by artist as you know. Right now I spend about 60% of my time listening to Tidal streams vs. my ripped collection. This does vary however. 

Roon shows my ripped and Tidal CDs by artist on one screen. I have duplicate copies of many CDs .... my rips and Tidal streams.

I found that Tidal has changed the way I listen to music. I used to listen to the same rotation of CDs for many years with few new additions. Now I am listening to new artists all the time! I am listening to so much more new music and loving the experience! Eric Bibb is one example of an artist I now listen to regularly that I was not aware of before Tidal. Great blues artist. Many, many others. I search out new stuff every week and it is so easy and convenient. All for $19 month. Yes, I love Tidal.

tostadosunidos
geoffkait, do you mean that new music on CD is more compressed than before or that new releases of old music (say, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s) is more compressed than previous CD releases?

Here’s the deal. The industry began overly compressing (reduced dynamic range) CDs about 20 years ago for whatever reason. All CDs are a little compressed, everything is relative. But as time went on more and more CDs were being overly compressed, especially remastered CDs, as well as new issues of CD such as Stones and Dylan and Radiohead and many others. Also new releases of LPs are often but not always overly compressed, as well as some but not all SACDs and Blu Ray and hi res downloads. You can look into these statement at the Official Dynamic Range Database which now has something like 100,000 entries. Check it out!

http://dr.loudness-war.info