CD PLAYERS £2,000-£3,200
THE VENERABLE COMPACT disc. Forty years old and still going, well, downhill to be blunt. Squeezed on one side by the ubiquity of streaming and, on the other, the much celebrated, though slightly sagging, vinyl revival, words like ‘moribund’ and ‘legacy’ often support the sorry tale of the CD’s gradual and seemingly irreversible demise.
But let’s just take stock for a moment. We’re talking here about arguably the most successful music replay format in history, progenitor of the Red Book 16 bit/44.1kHz ‘lossless’ digital standard on which most of the world’s music is stored and played. It’s the format largely responsible for killing off the miserable compact cassette and, ironically, triggering the vinyl revival.
No, not perfect, but the players – understandably fewer in number – have…
