How we gonna play our discs in the next future?!

[Sal1950]

From what I remember, the whole choice for using DSD on the SACD was to allow for cheaper DACs to be implemented into consumer players, as 24-bit 96-kHz DACs were expensive at the time SACD development started...but by the time SACD launched the price difference was negligible.

I believe the whole DSD drive was to lock down the disc's from being copied, etc.
CD ripping was already easy and rampant, but even to this day the ripping of SACDs is a very convoluted process
with dedicated hardware and software required to do so.
IMHO the myth of any superior sound quality over even plain Redbook 16/44.1 was spread into and by the High End cult to boy it's sales. The only real advantage the SACD discs allowed was the data density to support discreet multich over the CD's encode & compressed DTS-CD option.
As a 50+ year multich enthusiast I was never move pleased and excited to first see the DVD options appear on the scene, and then praise be the BluRay discs.
Optical media may be on the decline but I don't believe it will completely disappear as long as there are enough SOTA music and movie lovers like us still around to support it.

 

[DrKlahn]

That's true...but then I take a look over at the cassette realm, where there really isn't a new cassette deck with any sort of Dolby Noise Reduction...which is used on a LOT of cassette tapes.

While true, once you have the optical drive that can read the discs the rest is just software. There's no special physical hardware needed to support CD->UHD as long as the drive can read the bits.