If you were an audiophile, your options seemed to diminish as time went on. Many manufacturers who made a variety of separate CD players, cassette players, turntables, and equalizers discontinued several of their models based on low consumer demand. Consumer demand for “home theater in a box,” with complete packages at low pricing, marginalized a majority of consumer audio component products on the market. The compact disc was exploding in the retail world and reeling in customers to repurchase their music collections in digital formats, and the smaller, consumer-market home audio equipment that was available to play this new digital content was rapidly overshadowing the larger, higher-quality components, to conserve that space.ĭuring the rise of home theater and DVDs, bringing surround sound into the living room did give consumers a path to continue purchasing modular stereo equipment (known as component equipment). The home stereo system, once a modular system of silver-plated and vacuum-tube-driven components devoted to high fidelity, or Hi-Fi, was replaced by “mini-systems” and “boom boxes ” all-in-one solutions that were more cost effective and took up less space in the home. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, while hip-hop and grunge music took over the airwaves, another revolution affected nearly every listener, manifested in the way they consumed their favorite songs.