We were reel to reel, always a bit leary of eight track.
At least the reel to reel people where a bit more rational than the obsessed album people who had to clean them and touch them only on the sides and freaked if someone caused the album to skip and all that stuff. The upside of visiting them is that I never had to mess with the turntable as long as I could sit quietly. The downside of the reel to reel people is that they always played Jazz. I just listened to the radio at my place.
Whoa! Wait a sec! I never said I was rational! I have LPs heck I have 78s, I’m as loony as they come! I over-designed the addition to our home for my turntable. The plans reader for our city just didn’t get it, he kept saying “Hey you could save money if you just used dimensional lumber instead of this engineered stuff.” Guy was a total wacko!
Hmm. The folks I hung out with (I believe in this day and age one says, “Me and my Peeps” 
) used reel-to-reel mainly just for recording, for we had pretensions. Boy, did we have pretensions. But it was avant-garde in the sense that we played things like scissors and deodorant sticks, and amped a cello when no one else was doing that sort of thing as best as we knew. Took a shoebox, padding, a regular mike, and tape for that.
So actually, the only stuff we listened to on reel-to-reel was…us.
Way back in 1999, yes, 1999 my ex wife and I went to visit her parents in Xining City, Qinghai province, China. Its a fairly large (small by Chinese standards - only about a million people) city in the northwest. Her parents phone didn’t allow us to call out to the US so we had to hoof it down to the post office about a half mile down the street. There we had to pay and get them to dial the number and then take the call on a phone out in the main room of the post office. The connection was sketchy to say the least. It was a trip. Oddly, when we returned in 2005 everyone was walking around talking on cellphones and the entire city was much more modernized. It was no longer necessary to go to the post office to call home, either. It was a lot of change to have happened in 5 years.