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Flipping through an issue of Playboy from forty years ago, you find hi-fi ads that boast: "RCA Synergistic Stereo 10-inch woofers provide greater depth and clarity to the bass tones, giving them such power they can actually blow out a match!"

And: "Kenwood multiplies your pleasure with amazing sound performance!"

Typical of men's magazines of that vintage, Playboy was packed with come-ons for speakers, turntables and tape decks. This was a time when a man's stereo system was a measure of not only his taste for the finer things, but his sexual prowess.

Even the hi-fi jargon carried a libidinous charge--"viscous damped cueing," "gyroscopically gimballed mounting," "wow and flutter" and the always-suggestive "10-inch woofers."

Of course, all that sensual wood-and-chrome technology has been long swept away by the digital age. In our journey from hi-fi to iPod, we've willingly traded the plush for the portable, the sumptuous for the sleek, the full-bodied for the flat.

Beyond the kitschy fun and sexual correlations in the old hi-fi ads (nice stereo=getting laid), there is a reminder that in the transition, we've lost something far more than a tool of bachelor pad seduction.

Borrowing McLuhan's dictum, the hi-fi was also the medium for conveying the message of well-made recordings. There truly was a thrill--bordering on the sexual for some of us--listening to albums like Kind Of Blue, Abbey Road or Houses Of The Holy on a top-notch stereo system. You could hear the depth and definition of each instrument, as you were invited inside the warmth and space of the music. Play mp3 versions of those same records on the modern equivalent--an iPod through portable speakers--and well, it's a little like looking at a lo-res reproduction of Van Gogh's Starry Night online.

Today, producers and artists tailor records for iPods. Meaning? Depth and dynamics are gone (those dock speakers will not "blow out a match"), in favor of volume. My brother, a prominent mastering engineer, tells me that all his clients inevitably ask the same question: "Can you make it louder?" Louder is about the only parameter mp3s and iPods understand. Louder gets people's attention, but it quickly turns to fatigue.

In his thought-provoking book This Is Your Brain On Music, Daniel Levitin says, "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness. If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." It's that variation that we've lost. If you wonder why modern music often makes you feel restless (click-click), it may be more than the song or the singer.

So have we left hi-fis back with the rotary phone? Maybe not. While it's probably naïve to expect a major comeback, some listeners have had enough. And most of them are half the age of that back issue of Playboy. Thanks to these budding audiophiles, the sales of both vinyl recordings and turntables increased nearly 70 percent in 2008.

And for those young MOJO blog readers who wonder if I'm just blowing middle-aged smoke, a vintage ad for Sherwood receivers has your answer: "One good listen will spell it out more clearly than a thousand words."

Cavort with fellow sound-heads at mojo4music.com