I was reading your introduction and was struck by the last paragraph where you talked about today’s generation getting used to the lower quality of compressed downloads. It got me to thinking about the music delivery systems of my youth and how it might compare. Well, it was all analog and usually on an LP or 45 played on the Philco phonograph in a pull out drawer under the TV picture tube. A little later on we had a stand alone phonograph with a built in speaker and a ceramic pickup; just perfect for the Disney albums :-).

When I was 14 a friend of mine bought a 4 track tape player made by Muntz for his car, and I thought it was the coolest thing. A friend of his had managed to get a multi disk turntable in his glove box! I don’t know how it was amplified. Eight track players replaced the 4 track by squeezing 4 more tracks on the same width tape. Better fidelity? I don’t think so!

My first stereo was a Craig 8-track player/amp with two single-driver speakers connected via RCA plugs to the player. In college my roommate had a Lloyds combo TT, radio and amp with speakers and we wore it out. Everyone eventually moved up to Pioneer, Marantz, Sansui, Kenwood, etc. Integrated amps with separate turntables and speakers were the thing to have. Cassette decks were very popular as were open reel decks. Cassettes were great for carrying your music in the car, which by now every car had either a factory player or the user installed one.

Well, I could go on but the point of my recollection is that none of those systems were even near mid-fi let alone hi-fi or audiophile grade. Most people (including myself) didn’t know how to setup a TT and if the needle skipped, a quarter taped to the headshell took care of it. The 8 track tapes were very noisy and the wow and flutter was horrible, and about every 10th tape was eaten by the player! Cassettes were much better than 8 tracks but they still had a lot of tape hiss. I guess what I’m trying to say is that in spite of the poor playback systems, people still clung to their music and were always looking to up the quality when they understood where the deficiencies were. So I wouldn’t worry about highly compressed formats leading to the demise of hi fidelity; the iPod and MP3 format is much better than anything I listened to growing up.

Good Luck!

Bill