As someone who grew up during the transition, the killer feature of the CD was amazing audio quality and the lack of degradation from every playback. The period where we started finding albums marked "DDD", for fully digital production, was also amazing.

It saddens me a little that, in spite of all the technology, actual Hi-Fi listening seems to have become less accessible or prevalent. I'm still not sure how much this is really for the commonly stated reason of convenience, and how much that is really cope and denial of a bigger socio-economic decline. I.e. it simply isn't as realistic for regular people to have a Hi-Fi listening space...

Anecdotally, I don't think hi-fi's decline has to do with cost - at least not cost alone. You can still get a more than decent system which will fit most living rooms for quite reasonable money - I just had a look at prices at a national retailer's website here in Norway, and you can get a pair of decent bookshelf speakers and a stereo amp delivering 2x60W into 8 ohms, built-in streaming support and a HDMI input to ease connection to the TV, covering the most common use cases nowadays, for less than $1,000.

For comparison, median income after taxes is approx. $50,000 a year, so we're looking at less than a week's net wages.

I think it is more likely that our media consumption habits have changed - when I was a kid in the eighties, a few - like, the bank branch manager, the dentist and a few others - had a VCR at home. The rest of us had TVs, meaning we watched what was on at the time, or (once in a while) rented a VCR and a movie.

That aside, our media choices were radio, going to the cinema (not very often!) or - drumroll - recorded music.

Hence everybody had stereos. I believe my parents were quite typical - when I was a toddler, they bought a number of LPs with radio dramas for kids on them, music for kids &c - the stereo was basically the entertainment hub.

Today my family and I - wife and three kids aged 10, 12 and 16 - have between us, let's see, 2xTVs, a 40" and an 85", the latter with a 5.1 system attached, both with Apple TVs, a stereo (making us an outlier!), three ipads, three smartphones, two dumbphones, a handful of radios, three - oops, four - laptops, a PlayStation, a couple of Nintendo Switches...

There's basically so many more options to spend our media time on, and at the same time there's way more leisure activities aimed at kids now than when I was a kid, so the kids are barely at home during the week (at least it feels that way!), leaving less time (methinks) for media consumption than only a generation ago, while at the same time having many more options.

So - basically, for many, only a generation ago, the stereo was the entertainment hub and you were kind of expected to have one. Nowadays the entertainment hub is some kind of internet-connected device, and a stereo is a niche product.

Yeah, I think there are lifestyle changes and it is a shift of priorities. There are many choices. As a kid, I never would have imagines how many people would carry around $1k phones in their pockets and how many of these would exist in a household.

But I also hear lots of people complain they don't have the living space to dedicate to a Hi-Fi nor the time to use it if they did. To me, that is a sort of erosion of quality of life compared to what the middle class used to be able to enjoy.

> It saddens me a little that, in spite of all the technology, actual Hi-Fi listening seems to have become less accessible or prevalent.

I believe that hi-fi is not less accessible or prevalent than in past years/decades, it's just that most people don't care (and never have).

I mean, CDs replaced vinyl and cassettes for a lot of reasons, and the shuffle probably wasn't number one on anyone's list.

But still, I would be shocked if I listened to any CD straight through more than once, immediately after buying it. Once straight through to hear all the tracks, and then every time after that it'd be skipping around through my favorites or shuffling on repeat until I got tired of it and switched CDs.

And then once CD burners reached my price point, it was almost nothing but mix CDs, the original albums left on a rack in case I needed to re-rip them.

I did record a lot of my vinyl and CDs to cassette tape for portable and car use. I remember many public transit rides with my walkman and a zipper case of 10 tapes or so. I made some mix tapes but mostly just ran albums straight through on 90 minute metal tapes, repeating or cutting a track as needed to fill the 45 minute side and make auto-reverse pleasant without any winding.

But, ignoring mix tapes, I didn't really get into track-level shuffling until the MP3 era where I could shuffle a much bigger pile of tracks. I do remember that a Sony 5-disc carousel could shuffle tracks reasonably quickly. But when I used players with a 6 or 10 disc cassette, track shuffle would mean spending a lot of time listening to servo motors and occasionally disturbing clunks that evoked visions of shattered or gouged discs.

I never had one of those massive jukebox style carousels that was sort of a hybrid of the two and could quickly switch among scores or hundreds of discs. By the time I saw those as affordable, they already seemed obsolete. Instead, I was ripping my CDs to MP3 (eventually repeated to FLAC), and had a USB to S/PDIF soundcard to send audio back to my A/V receiver over optical fiber.

> But still, I would be shocked if I listened to any CD straight through more than once, immediately after buying it. Once straight through to hear all the tracks, and then every time after that it'd be skipping around through my favorites or shuffling on repeat until I got tired of it and switched CDs.

I think that a reasonable number of people had audio gear (boomboxes) that could play a CD and record it to tape at the same time (and also record the radio to tape).

I think that for a number of years a lot of folks used mix tapes to listen to their favourite tracks from a CD (or a number of CDs).