How do you listen to music? And what kit do you have?

^ I've got a very good Pro-Ject turntable for playing my old 78s

I listen to music in all sorts of formats: vinyl (including quadraphonic), cassette, CD, eight-track cartridge (including quadraphonic), reel-to-reel, files, streams, DVD-A, SACD, HDCD and Blu-ray Audio. I wanted to assemble a hifi system that could play just about anything to a good standard, and consequently it's a mix of modern and vintage components, wired together in unusual ways. I have 20,000+ items – mostly vinyl and CDs – in my physical collection, including some very rare and obscure LPs.

I have moved my hifi right next to my bed and started playing vinyl regularly for the first time in years.

Most of my listening is done on MP3 players as next door have a baby.
For quite a while the houses either side were both empty I wish I'd taken advantage and blasted the fuck out of my CDs and vinyl

Theres a good article in the latest issue of 'Safety Pin' magazine about 8 tracks snd how the song fizzled out on the first side and had to be played again on the second side as the first track!

I honestly can't remember, I also never saw any in a house either just the ones in motors but my memory could be wrong.

Mrs Roguepunk still has a few from her childhood, will have to dig them out.

She also has a brand new cassette cleaner which is still in its wrapper and never been used.

How useless were they?!

No, I bought it on eBay a few years ago. It was in mint condition and perfect working order and cost £42. I bought it mainly because an album I really wanted to hear in quadraphonic – The Worst of Jefferson Airplane – had never been released in any other format.

Quad was potentially a very good format – the equal in sound quality of modern 5.1 mixes.

The problem is that quadraphonic LPs prevented serious issues. There were two types: CD4 and SQ (Matrix). CD4 LPs were far superior in audio terms, with four discrete tracks; unfortunately, the rear channels were encoded ultrasonically in the grooves, requiring both a special "Shibata" stylus and a decoder. Worse, playing a CD4 LP with a conventional stylus could erase the ultrasonic information so that it would never play properly again. Even unplayed CD4 LPs don't always play faultlessly, with rear channel dropouts. SQ LPs are much less fragile and don't require a special stylus, but since they use post-processing to separate out the rear channels the quad effect is rather poor.

Reel-to-reel was probably the best format available at the time for quad, but the tapes are as rare as hen's teeth so it's one rabbit-hole I won't go down – I'll play quadraphonic LPs and cartridges instead.