What equipment or event thrust you into the hobby?

So, reporting back again, I was a student at Gettysburg College in the late 60s/early 70s. The guy that lived next door in the dorm had a father who was a buyer for a major retailer. Well, one day, a Class 8 truck pulled up to the dorm and out comes some high end SONY electronics, compliments of Vito...not the stuff they sold at K-Mart-the stuff they were selling out of Japan. Turns out the guy took a bribe and the kid was on the receiving end of the payoff. That system really had some serious dynamic drive to it. So when I graduated in '73, I was determined to buy a "high end" receiver...resulting in the Marantz 2252 in 1975. I listened contently to the Marantz and the Advents for 20 years...because I loved the music. Then one day on a business trip, I had a few hours to kill and walked through the doors of Audio Emporium in Brown Deer, Wisconsin...and Dave introduced me to a Threshold T-200 amplifier. I remembered the kid that got the SONY stuff from Vito and decided it was time to play Vito for my own gratification. I mated the Threshold to a Modulus 3 with phono stage purchased from Audio Connection in Verona, N.J. This was hooked up to a rather modest pair of Monitor Audio MA700s...which were replaced by a pair of Dynaudio Contour 1.8s auditioned during a trip to Chicago. And then I discovered tubes....

My brother used to take me to a store called Audioland. It was on the east side of Detroit. They carried Mid-fi and high end. My brother was constantly changing speakers. I would go with him and wander into the high-end rooms. I didn't know what the stuff was I was only 11 at the time. When I was 15 I went to a trade school to learn how to fix Audio equipment and TV's. I never carried for fixing tv's but I loved working on audio gear. By the time I was 17 I was going to all the high-end stores in Michigan. I've have been hooked since then. Such is life!

Over at a friends house cutting school in the garage up to no good we listened to Edgar Winter's "Frankenstien" on some JBL speakers ( the one's with the thick blue foam grill covers, what model was that? ) back around 1974. Then "Dark side of the Moon" Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and "Tres Hombres" by ZZ Top " They gotta lotta nice girls out there ". I was hooked and bought my first system on the money I made after school, a little Sony system.
Then when I got out on my own I bought an Advent reciever/ BSR turntable and some very nice solid oak veneer JBL speakers, can't remember the model number of those either.
Those JBL's lasted a long long time.
I dropped out of the hobby for some 20 years and then a few years back I bought some new Magnepan MMG's wow! Hooked again.

I always played with whatever stereo stuff we had laying around the house as a kid, an old turntable and such. But it wasn't until I heard my brother in laws system in my teens, with some monoblock amps that looked like legos he was working on, and a Theta DAC that the spark happened. It was the first time that I really saw that there is this whole subculture of people that are obsessed with the quality of the sound. Before this point I didn't really even think about it. Now it's all over, I'm one of them!

I did recently get a chance to purchase the very monoblock amps that got me into this hobby, so I bought them. They still sound good, but now they remain in my collection unused and under a dust cover for nastalgia sake.

Early 70's the last school day of the year some friends and I went to a guys house in a Lutheran Seminary,his dad was the dean of the school.

I was caught by surprise by the sounds of Yes-Roundabout through some big NEW Bozak Concert Grands and I have never been the same since.

I have been involved in Audio and the business of it ever since in some form or another.

Forward to the mid-late 70's and I met Roy Allison and Gordon Gow at the dealer I worked for. I did what it took to get some Allison 3's and an old Mac 225 Tube AMp. I had a Rek-o-Kut Rondine Table and Mac pre-amp too.

Then we moved and our neighbor was an Audio Consultant who rigged the Masters and Johnson "Clinic" here in St.Louis.He was a Crown and Electrovoice dealer and had a pair of custom speakers featuring two of those god-forsaken 30" EV Foam Woofers driven by Crown through tube crossovers he had built himself.
A certain new madness overcame me right then and the rest is really a blur.

What a hobby!