Consumer Electronics

Does anyone under thirty (and not in extreme poverty) know what it's like not to have the means of reproducing music that you own? (ie CD/MD player etc.)

I'm listening nostalgically to Wish You Were Here, and thinking back to the days before I had a record player, or any records - let alone a cassette player. I could only play my mum and dad's records on their radiogram (one of those big sideboard things, with a sliding door on the front: more a structural fitting than an entertainment system).
I got a transistor radio for my 11th birthday: a cheap plastic thing, but I loved it and prized it - even the (single) cheap plastic earphone that was like an instrument from the doctor's surgery. I bought my first record in about 1973 (Waterloo, if you must know), and I guess I inherited my brother's record player shortly after that. Next came the big one - a portable cassette player of my own. I recall that this was a heavy manufacture by ITT, with a dense black plastic body and a fetching silver metal trim, which had holes punched in it to facilitate the flow of sound from the speaker beneath. Again, I remember love for, and attachment to, that inanimate object. Which feels odd. I guess we were quite poor then (my mum was on her own), so anything material and new was precious.

The other thing that strikes me is how constrained our choices were. You had to wait for your favourite songs to come on the radio, and hope that you had your cassette handy to tape them. Everything is monstrously accessible now. Some part of me thinks that the loss of mystery/happenstance that entails is sad in some way. I haven't thought it through, though, so I'm probably just being romantically nostalgic. "Aye, lad, I remember when you were lucky to get an LP that lasted forty minutes. You 80-minute CDers don't know you're born."