One of the benefits of being a home and car audio salesperson during college was access to some cool gear plus incredible employee discounts (typically 50% off

One of the benefits of being a home and car audio salesperson during college was access to some cool gear plus incredible employee discounts (typically 50% off retail price). A unit missing from this article is the DAT player. I had the Sony DTX-10 DAT player which also controlled a 10-disc CD player which was mounted in the trunk. Now that's all obsolete thanks to streaming (and downloaded) music. The DAT player was effectively your mix-tape machine, at CD quality. Of course to have anything to play, you also needed the home DAT unit which was connected to your CD player so you could build (record) your playlist (mixtape). For mostly better, but also a little worse, it's almost no effort to select, arrange, and play almost any music you want. The tactile experience is lost, which is a shame. There's something very satisfying about handling the media, pressing the real buttons, and waiting for the music to play the first time as you're recording it onto the DAT (same experience applies for recording cassette mixtapes in the older days). Humorously, the old car which I installed the DAT player into was the same car that originally had an 8-track tape player (which worked, and for which I had a few tapes I listed to).