Vinyl, FM radio and chrome tapes.
No Dolby.
Sounded excellent but the tapes could get jammed and tended to get warped when used in overheating car stereos.
Necessary skills included the occasional editing/splicing of broken tape, manually adjusting tape head azimuth, demagnetising, and the cleaning of the heads and rollers.
My NAD 6050c gave great access for all of the maintenance until it was superceded by MiniDisc (which avoided all the issues and had infinitely superior editing options).
flatblackround,
It’s funny how I used to try so hard to edit out the DJs chatter when recording the chart show every Sunday but now decades later realise I should have left it in to capture that period feel.
I definitely would have if I knew back then of the approaching of the digital age. MP3s, downloading, streaming, CDRs all would have seemed like science fiction back then.