It is interesting that many of us started with a Pioneer receiver (or at least had at one point one early on.) I remember reading Stereo Review and being inundated by the ads for Pioneer that made them look like the cat's pajamas. When I went to Hillcrsst High Fidelity and walked past the McIntosh Audition Room after gawking at the seductive blue glow of the monster components that I saw in the living rooms of some of my rich friends (where they sat virtually unused, but off limits to our sticky hands.) There on the wall stack high with receivers sat a new line - "Sony." The salesman gave a hard sell on the Sony, but I wanted the well-marketed Pioneer. A concentration camp surviving cello-playing academic colleague of my father warned "they are pushing Sony equipment - don't trust them, that stuff is made in Japan." (Like Pioneer wasn't?)
I put together a complete Pioneer system using all the money I earned on my $1.50/hr summer job stocking shelves, slicing watermelons, waxing apples, and bagging grocks in Ryder's Grocery in Estes Park Colorado upwards of 72hrs a week. The 3 months of weary labor under the irritable eye of the owner of poorly accessible and easy-to-drive-right-by=without-noticing family-owned grocery store in a tourist town full of barefoot campers and hikers .
It was all worth it when I got the system home and cued up the first LP that I ever owned - Jethro Tull's Living in the Pat that I got for $2 from a cut-out bin at Walgreen's (I still remember my mother saying "why are you wasting your money on *that*?) - then I played my other *first* record - Itzahk Perlman's Paganini Caprices. I remember thinking "is that what a Strad really sounds like? or is he playing a cheesebox strung with hand-dried cat-gut?"
But I was in music heaven. It sounded so much better than my parent's no-name console that they picked up at the Dallas Train Wreck Salvage (that was the actual name of the warehouse store that was filled with deeply discounted cracked, dented, and broken items. I feel fortunate to have survived a childhood feed by badly bent and dented cans of food. My mother used to say, "don't worry, the can will swell up if it is contaminated by Botulism so I think this one is OK. Just make sure you let me know if your jaw begins to lock up."
Music was so much enjoyable when it provided a brief respite from the childhood fears of razor-blade ridden Halloween apples, practicing surviving nuclear attack by cowering under desks during air-raid drills, dental fillings performed without novocaine by our WWI era dentist who had a faded and yellowed "50 years of Dental Practice" certificate on his wall, and the near constant vigilance for Lock-jaw.
It is sort of a strange evolution that I now constantly search for better and more refined sound in order to capture the immense joy of discovery that early equipment provided.
I am coming to realize that it isn't that the POC Pioneer receiver sounded good. I believe that I used to *listen* better. I enjoyed cassettes recorded off-the-air played back on a $20 portable panasonic tape recorder placed on the seat next to me as I drove my parents Galaxy 500 station wagon. Perhaps it is about nostalgia, desire to regain innocence lost, a search for the lost idealism of youth...
So perhaps this amp evolution is driven by an attempt to chase down, and maybe even overcome, the creeping evolution of our jaded ears.
