When did it all start?

Do you remember what speaker cable and wires were used?:-)

Padgitt's Hi Fi. (I think that's how they spelled it.) Waco, TX. Mid 70's. I was a poor, starving law student at Baylor University. All I could do was drool and dream over the blue glow of McIntosh tube gear amid the sounds of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt.

Funny thing. By the time my bank account finally caught up to my taste in tube gear, I had moved on to Audio Research.

For me, it didn't start all at once. I took a few years of electricity/electronics in high school -- even designed and built a tube amplifier. That got me hooked on electronics.

During high school, a local radio station in Chicago played very unusual album oriented rock, etc. I still remember listening to Osibisa at 2:00 am. That got me hooked on music.

When I went to college, a couple of engineering pals had very fine systems (one all tube, one all solid state). Hearing quality music through those systems got me hooked on sitting down and attentively listening to music while appreciating the reproduction. One of them ended up doing the technical work for a major midwest audio chain and I bought my first system there and loved it.

Take that history and mix in a healthy dollop of obsessive behavior and insanity and here I am. Just another audioholic on the Gon ;-)

I grew up in a home with a killer console stereo. Mom and Dad had just gone to the race track for an afternoon of betting and I was left alone with Meet The Beatles. The rest history.

When I was growing up in downtown Milwaukee we lived in a two family house. We were quite poor and only had an old tube bakalite radio. My mother always had it tuned to the 'Christian' radio station so I never heard any other music.
One day I was in the bathroom doing my business when I heard music coming from the people living upstairs. It must have been due to some strange plumbing anomoly. It was around 1972 and I was just 11 years old and intrigued. They were playing 'Rock and Roll' it was like nothing I had ever heard. The Beatles were still around, Simon and Garfunkel ruled the airwaves.
I spent way too much time in the bathroom, to my mothers chagrin and puzzlement. Eventually I began to recognize different tunes.
I was in Junior High before I got my own radio. It was an old H & R Block throw-away. Thank goodness they decided to buy something better for the offices.
But if it weren't for that pressing engagement when I was a kid I might never have spent so much money and time on this obsessive past time, and I would have missed out on all this crap.