All I remember about the Dolby button was that it made everything sound like it was recorded under water.
As I'm of a certain era, tapes were a fundamental part of my life. From recording my favourite tunes from the top 40 every Sunday evening and that crunch moment when you ran out of tapes and have to go back and overwrite an older compilation. The days when you didn't care about being cool, you'd happily listen to the Sisters of Mercy followed by Nik Kershaw and so would everyone you knew. As a grown adult, of course the first album I bought was something by the Cure, or the Smiths, or Adam and Ants (but before they became popular, the Dirk album that everyone bought but listened to once). Complete lie, of course. The first actual cassette album I bought was Mr Mr's epic pile of uncool MOR dad rock Broken Wings. I can still sing that title song now. That said, I also bought the 12-inch of Rock Me Amadeus and played it so often my dad stomped in and threw it out of the window. So I put his shittenly Pink Floyd tapes in the dustbin. He still reminds of the Great Music Wars of my Youth. He never got over the fact that it was bin day. I might not have cared that much about being cool, but having to buy a replacement copy of Dark Side of the Moon when you're thirteen was awful.
Then the first Walkmen (so sexist, so sexist), I got a chunky one, used four AA batteries and lasted for about fifteen minutes. But I felt like I'd strolled out of a teen angst movie and into the arms of Molly Ringwald. They did get smaller rapidly, I think the last one I had was smaller than the tape that went in it. Ironically, all the wannabe cool kids now walk around in giant headphones with dinner tray sized phones.
My friend got the first double-speed tape so you could copy albums twice as fast, that was awesome (home taping is killing music, now twice as quickly) at the expense of recording that occasionally slowed down and sped up. The version of Charlotte Street I had featured Lloyd Cole doing a complete Swiss yodel at the end of the middle-eight.
Then there were mixtapes, that vital part of any courtship ritual. Exchanging mix-tapes was the precursor of any attempt to exchange bodily fluids, a lot rode on the selection. We were well beyond mashing up the Sisters and Kershaw. Then when everything broke down, you'd listen to those tapes as you sobbed into your cider. I certainly exchanged a lot more mixtapes than bodily fluids, for sure. I probably should have dialed down the Kershaw quotient.
Somewhere in the loft, I've a duffel bag filled with tapes, I'd go get it, but the only tape player we have is in the car (as mentioned elsewhere, this was a punitive addition by Ford because we bought the cheapest model).
