D.M. Procida wrote:

Clearly, the discerning hi-fi consumer will buy whatever seems to work
for them at the right price.

But, why do the manufacturers design and build CD players the way they
do?

[...]

The cheapest CDROM drive has to scrape every bit off a disc in order to
function as a reliable device for digital storage of software and data.
Presumably it can do just the same job for a music CD.

It might be cool to design a CD player with a solid, weighty chassis and
aerospace-grade bearings - but if the job of getting data off it can be
done as effectively by a transport + reader + data interface that costs
peanuts, why spend money doing that when it could be spent where it
would make more difference (a better DAC, a better control interface, a
better PSU)?

It's still not clear to me whether I'm missing something about how CD
audio actually works, or whether the CD player as we've known it for the
last 30+ years is an anachronism.

In a hotel lobby today, I was leafing through an hi-fi magazine I
happened to see. It reviewed a CD player, opening with a sentence to the
effect that "the CD player as we know it may soon be dead".

This CD player (a Meridian, and rather expensive) apparently uses a
cheap CD-ROM drive to get the data off the disk, and can use the drive's
extra speed to read ahead and buffer it (allowing it for example to have
multiple goes at reading problematic areas of the disk) in pretty much
the way I suggested would be possible.

I assume it's this one:
https://www.meridian-audio.com/en/products/cd-players/reference-808v6/.

So maybe I'm not missing anything... although I do note that this
solution to the problem of playing CDs doesn't actually make the
business cheaper.

Daniele