Many 20-somethings are into the music of the '60s and '70s, but it's how they listen to this nostalgic noise that is different.

Yep, gone is the large-and-in-charge home stereo system. Now you can fit all your music in a hand-held iPod, and with two, tiny earphones, enjoy your collection in a blissful state of isolation.

Boy, what a difference a few decades makes.

Back when I was a college-bound freshman (that would be 1981), size mattered, especially when it came to stereos.

If you wanted to be considered a hip music aficionado, you had to own at the very least a turntable, receiver and a couple speakers with woofers the size of popcorn bowls.

Popularly referred to as a "rack system" way back when, the presentation of the collective gear was often as thought out as the actual music collection, which at the time of my college days was just leaving the album stage and heading into cassette tapes.

We loved the tape, which made it easy to record our favorite albums and carry a whole collection around, packed on 10-15 cassettes housed in a plastic box.

But back in 1981, every dorm room worth its salt had a nice rack - system, that is. We even had "speaker night," which allowed you to crank up the volume and let the neighbors hear the limits (distortion be damned) of your system.

There was always one guy who had the mac-daddy setup, and his stack of amps and preamps along with the high-dollar tape player and turntable were the envy of the dorm. And he was also the guy you secretly laughed at when his system blew a fuse or flipped the dorm's power breaker.

Also, if you had to be courteous to you neighbors, you could don a pair of headphones. But no, kids, these were nothing like the ear buds you wear nowadays. Back then we had the bulky Koss headphones, which added considerable weight to your cabeza, even if we always thought the sound quality was worth every pound.

Back in the day, we had special cleaners for our LP's (long-playing record, as they were known), and also kits to keep the heads on the tape deck spic and span and ready for action. We'd string RCA cables between all the components, and run speaker wire for days all around the room.

Nowaday, kids just hit the power button and adjust the volume. Boy, they have it easy.

Back at college, a few years later, the boombox came into popularity.

And by 1984, when I had transferred to another college, I packed along my tidy little cassette collection and a nifty boombox. Much easier to cart around. By now, Music Television (MTV) had transferred music from an audio to a visual entertainment format, and the sound quality decreased dramatically as kids wanted to see what the rock stars were up to much more than worrying about how they sounded on their little stereos.

It was also about this time that a new device, the Sony Walkman, became available. My roommate bought one, and I was able to borrow it from time to time.

It was so nice to pop in a cassette, hit play and head out to wherever you were going, your tunes filling your head the whole way. What a life!

Progress is inevitable, they say. But progress doesn't account for the experience that it robs future generations of. I shudder to think what contraption we'll be listening to music on 20 years from now.

Or maybe we'll just be able to "beam" ourselves to whatever concert or club we want to attend at any given moment.

Now, that's progress!

You can attempt to reach Jerry Hitchcock at 664-8176, Ext. 2017, or via email at jhitchcock@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter at HitchTheWriter.