What began your enthusiasm? i.e. what was the unit that did it?

[kjello]

My parents 1979 german made 30lbs 2X35W Normende 8025 SCP with a lovely Dual 1225 tt, and all the Elvis Presley and ABBA records you can think of...
Edit: I forgot the norwegian Wellex C2042 speakers, I belive there was Phillips or Seas drivers.

 

[Poultrygeist]

Open baffles rekindled the flame after too many years listening to speakers that sounded like music coming from a box.

 

[trinhsman]

When I heard the Audio Research D-76a amp with SP-3A preamp an AR turntable and Tympani 1C speakers together....................24 years old.............bought the whole damn thing and paid on it for 3 years like you would a car. That was what initially hooked me.

 

[red 111]

lucky to hear lots of live music in the 60s...all of my friends purchased those wonderful KLH units...i had the KLH model 35...wow ,really was better than anything id heard at the point,until i heard a friends Marantz system....i lived in LIC.where the Marantz & Pilot factories were located & some friends worked part time at the Pilot place & would get discounts.I was offered a deal ,but didn't pull the trigger...oh well..lots of us also bought the KLH Model 21 FM radio...i still use the 1968 unit i got for $89 at Harvey Radio on Nassau st in lower Manhattan...still sounds great & never been repaired

 

[Ds2000]

If you're referring to mom and dad's console, it was solid state, and had big gigantic foam covers over the main woofers. Funky, but sounded great. They bought it in 1975, I think, and I remember standing up in the car to go get it. I was 3. About all I can remember about it. I ended up running my Sharp GF-575 thru it via the HEADPHONE jack, because nobody bothered to explain "Line In" to me, lol.

I did answer in post #99, but forgot to quote you.

 

[Lavane]

If we're being honest, the Magnavox console my folks had.

My first system was a Pioneer all in one unit, definitely great for a 15 year old, but then at 18, I purchased a damaged Sansui AU-G99X. I just KNEW it was something special, and I was right.

Got it fixed, still own it (full rebuild as well!) and the rest is history.

My folks had a Packard Bell consol. Even as a kid, it was unlistenable for me. It wasn't a Magnavox, thats for sure. However, the big 26" BW Packard Bell TV was my Saturday morning best friend.

 

[70'sAudio]

It was May 5,1973 in Tampa,FL I was 9yrs Old when I saw my first Led Zeppelin Concert I was Hooked on Loud Rock n Roll.

This was The Setlist:
Rock and Roll, Celebration Day, (Bring It On Home intro) Black Dog, Over the Hills and Far Away, Misty Mountain Hop, Since I've Been Loving You, No Quarter, The Song Remains the Same, Rain Song, Dazed and Confused (incl. San Francisco), Stairway to Heaven, Moby Dick, Heartbreaker, Whole Lotta Love (incl. Let That Boy Boogie), The Ocean, Communication Breakdown.

It was 1976 I was 12yrs Old when I bought my first Receiver an SX-780 with My lawn mowing money My Dad bought me a set of Jensen 3-way Home Speakers and a PL-518 TT.


I still Have Both the SX-780 and the PL-518 I no longer have the Jensens.


Thanks for the Trip Down Memory Lane, Mike.

 

[cratz2]

My mom worked for a non-profit in Dallas and I volunteered there as well. One of the big events was at a guy's house that had an all Goldmund system including some nearly seven foot tall speakers. I talked to the host about them and he also had another system that had B&W 800 Matrix speakers. Never heard the Goldmund system, but he let me listen to the B&W system and to say I was floored would be an understatement. They sounded so natural and had such unrestrained dynamics. All this was with classical music so had no idea how they would work with pop/rock/electric jazz music with processed bass.

That was a defining moment for me.

 

[E-Stat]

Hearing tri-amped Magneplanar Tympani IIIs using Audio Research electronics (Crown DC-300a on woofer) with Linn Sondek LP-12 / SME 3009 / Ortofon SL15E when I was 17 circa '74.

Next recalibration came in '80 when I first heard HP's system at Sea Cliff using the Infinity IRS, Conrad-Johnson Premier One amp. Dennesen JC80 preamp, Goldmund turntable / T3 arm / Koetsu black.

 

[onwardjames]

I did answer in post #99, but forgot to quote you.

Quite alright. No, it was some late 80's bpc thang. Durable as hell, but sounded, in hindsight, like a well executed fart.

Not my system, but the main receiver part of it is VERY close.

 

[Ds2000]

Quite alright. No, it was some late 80's bpc thang. Durable as hell, but sounded, in hindsight, like a well executed fart.

Not my system, but the main receiver part of it is VERY close.

View attachment 989473

Ohhh yes I remember these in electronics retailers. I would set them all to the hard rock station, wait for NIN to come on and run down cranking all the volume knobs. Terrible and loud. They threw me out of a few places.

 

[restorer-john]

I remember putting demo cassette tapes in the powered car stereo switcher walls at Kmart. We'd rewind the tape to the beginning, turn up the volume as high as it would go, press dolby and roll off the treble and then rapidly depart the auto section. In the 6-10 seconds before the music started blaring, we could be innocently checking out the sporting goods section. There was a massive blast of music that only stopped when a staff member ran across the store to stop it.

Ah, to be a teenager again.

 

[Hak Foo]

My parents said they had read a bunch of stereo magazines in the 1970s and assembled a 'nice system' for the time. It was a HK 330c, a Kenwood tape deck, and a BIC turntable. The speakers were big boxes with like 15 inch woofers; I want to say the badges on them said Audio Technica, but I'm pretty sure they just do cartridges and turntables.

The system never worked much when I was growing up in the 1990s. I was told that as an infant I fed the tape deck a sandwich, but when I poked around at it a little, it started working again. Maybe most of the sandwich degraded.

Apparently one speaker was dead, so I just dissected it and put some computer speakers into it as a sort of bass-reflex enclosure. the turntable supposedly had a bad belt (but ISTR it said direct-drive on it?!) but had a bad stylus or cartridge. I recall getting yelled at for experimenting with mounting a nail in the wreckage of the cartridge and discovering that got sound out of the records. The one I recall messing with was a collection of JFK speeches. Eventually we went to the Penney's outlet and bought an MCS turntable, likely just before the line disappeared entirely, but it still didn't get much mileage until I got my own reciever (a Pioneer VSX-305) and started to assemble a system. I converted a few records to MP3 by running the headphone out of the reciever to my PC's line in. The MCS itself was a mess physically, so it eventually got replaced with a USB nightmare (I didn't realize, coming from the computer space, that new products would be dramatically inferior to old ones) I knew something was wrong when the sound was quite audible with no amplification on--- it was a heavy track with no adjustment, so it had to go, for a light-track with no adjustment.

My brother got the HK and tape deck; he records broadcasts in association with a DXing hobby, but doesn't even have speakers. The tape deck died due to old belts, so I got him, half-jokingly, a top-loading Sharp tape deck from a thrift shop as a gift and he still uses it regularly. I've tried to convince him to go to a digital format just because the tapes are difficult to find new and degrade, but he insists compression is evil and refuses to adknowledge that lossless formats exist.

 

[soundmotor]

Spica Angelus on niche solid-state amp/preamp comb & vinyl, 1988 or thereabouts.

It was an ear-opening experience compared to my late 80's Pioneer SUX-number string receiver.