You know what else has changed? Speakers. Does anyone remember the JBL Century 100 speaker system? This speaker was truly fantastic with their fantastic base and punchy mid range. This was the prime example of the highly overblown West Coast sound as produced by these base reflex speakers with their carefully sized and tuned cabinets and air vents. . These speakers sounded best with rock and pop music. They were not considered accurate reproducers of music, and today even JBL base reflex speakers sound much more like Acoustic suspension speakers as made by Acoustic Research, Advant and other speakers of this type.
While today’s speakers are more accurate producers of sound, as seemly dictated by today’s modern digital media standards, the deep base and punchy mid range are missing and music does, in fact, sound different.
Sometimes highly accurate is not best.