A week before I left for college I bought a Sony boombox to use as a bookshelf stereo. It had detachable speakers, so you could actually achieve stereo separation, and, of course, “mega bass”, which was pretty much mandatory for good sound in such small speakers.

I chose this particular model because it had an analog 3-band equalizer, as opposed to several genre-specific settings; I relied on the EQ to pick out guitar and bass parts I would transcribe. As a bonus, it didn’t have a crazy light show like the many of the other boomboxes on sale in 1996.

I don’t remember very well how it sounded, to be honest, because I wasn’t able to use it that much. My freshman year roommate and I did not share musical tastes, so I had to play my music through my computer using headphones. (My computer’s CD-ROM drive actually had a dedicated “play” button and its own headphone jack.) I didn’t realize it at the time, but all those hours listening to music over headphones (the cheapest headphones possible, I’d say) in my dorm room were the very beginning of my headphone-centric music listening preferences.