Walking into a serious audio store these days is like entering a time machine. All the talk is about room-filling high-fidelity sound. The gear is new, but the conversations are much like those your father and grandfather had when they went shopping for hi-fi.

Outside the store, meanwhile, most people under 25 are getting their music from cheap ear buds, tiny laptop speakers and compact sound files that have had much of the music’s sonic juices squeezed out of them. Convenience has brought about a low-fi revolution in the way we hear music.

So what’s a record producer to do? Keep on recording music to sound great on conventional stereo systems, or tweak things to get as much as possible from a speaker as big as your fingernail?

It’s not an entirely new question. When AM radio play was essential to selling records, some musicians and producers trimmed their mixes in line with the limited capacity of pocket transistor or car radios.