My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.

My dad had an Akai M8 (7" tapes) that I was not allowed to touch under threat of injury, but then he got heavily into quad vinyl and gave the beast to me: The whole Beatles catalogue on 7" tapes, yay!