I remember when we were all rocking walkmans/aiwas and just accepted the mediocre sound quality of our mix tapes. CDs were ubiquitous but most portable players were prone to skipping and there was no economic way to create mix tapes on CDs for us. The day I bought a portable Sharp mindisc recoder and created the my first digital CD to Mindisc mix via an optical connection was eye opening. I cannot overstate what a game changer it was in creating portable CD quality mixes.