I’ve been an audiophile since high school. Growing up with a jazz musician/Caltech scientist father, I wasn’t allowed to use the system in his study: a Fisher 400 receiver, an ELAC/Benjamin Miracord turntable (with styli for both 33 and 78 rpm; he’d been a band leader in the 1940s, and recorded a dozen or so 78s), and KLH speakers. In college, dorm mates had systems I coveted: ESS speakers with that Heil “Air Motion Transformer” tweeter element, double Advent speakers; even a Heathkit receiver that a particularly nerdy friend assembled one summer. Probably the best component in my necessarily modest system in those days was a Thorens turntable with a Micro-Acoustics cartridge. I lost that in a burglary in upstate NY in 1978, along with some Kenwood separates. My Design Acoustics D2 speakers are still with me, though.
In 1969, my parents' fancy Beverly Hills friends gave me "Electric Landyland" for Christmas. At the holiday party at their house, I heard it for the first time on their Bose 901s, professionally set up hanging from the ceiling in the corners. I was a JBL fetishist at the time, and wasn't impressed.
Then, in college, a friend with similar interests took me (it must have been 1970 or '71) to a high-end store in Los Gatos. The salesman was kind of rude to us, knowing we couldn't afford any of his stuff—but he did agree to play Beethoven's Eighth Symphony from the Berlin/Karajan box set that included the Ninth. That was probably my "aspirational" moment: his shop had a properly set-up listening room (with the exception of the Bose, even the good stuff I'd heard to that point had been in dorm rooms). I've been hooked ever since.
