Why are CD's decling in quality?

Multiple lasers? Now, That's funny!!

Courtesy Wikipedia:

"Many early LDs were not manufactured properly; sometimes a substandard adhesive was used to sandwich together the two sides of the disc.[citation needed] The adhesive contained impurities that were able to penetrate the lacquer seal layer and chemically attack the metalized reflective aluminium layer, causing it to oxidize and lose its reflective characteristics. This was a problem that was termed "laser rot" among LD enthusiasts, also called "color flash" internally by LaserDisc-pressing plants. Some forms of laser rot could appear as black spots that looked like mold or burned plastic which cause the disc to skip and the movie to exhibit excessive speckling noise. But, for the most part, rotted discs could actually appear perfectly fine to the naked eye.

Later optical standards have been known to suffer similar problems, including a notorious batch of defective CDs manufactured by Philips-DuPont Optical at their Blackburn, Lancashire facility in England during the late 1980s/early 1990s."

Personally, I have not found CDs declining in quality. I've always felt they were delicate from the very beginning and try to handle them carefully (at least the same as LPs). The hype about them being tough is just that. I'm not exactly sure what the OP is getting at.

As far as sound quality, I think we're finally getting someplace with some of the best sounding CDs coming out recently.

"I think we're finally getting someplace with some of the best sounding CDs coming out recently."

I'll agree with that Rja.
Quick story... around 1985 when I bought my first CDs, I found out quickly that they were not superior to vinyl (I had a $250 CDP, so who knows). They were also marketed as indestructible, so I tossed a CD across the driveway a few times and you can guess the result.

So Geoffkait what do they use to read the data from CD's?