I actually started listening to music on my parents' open-reel player, also known as reel-to-reel; yaknow, the format that is used to this day for 911-audio and also used by law enforcement surveillance units? It was a viable high-end commercial format for a number of years, with fantastically good sound quality for the time; record companies released product in that format for quite a while. It says something about the generational knowledge of the person who wrote this prompt that he/she didn't include reel-to-reel. Ha!

My earliest childhood memories include listening to The Fifth Dimension's Greatest Hits On Earth, the original cast recording of the musical Camelot, the film soundtrack of The Sound Of Music, and Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos, all on open-reel. My parents were both music lovers so one of the first things they bought when we moved to Japan was a super high-end audio system; it was 1974 and we had a component-based system with a Pioneer amp, 150-watt JVC speakers, Technics record player, and Sony reel-to-reel. 35 years later, all those components still work (including the Technics Dolby-A cassette player that my father added to the system in 1981).

As for the music of "my generation" ... the first LP I bought with my own money was 1984 by Van Halen, although that very day I also bought the soundtrack of the movie Footloose on cassette. I still have both of them, although I did later re-buy both albums on CD.