Your First System

It was 1982 and I was only 9years old. Dad gave me a NAD6040 tape deck - to play recordings made on his Linn LP12 / Nakamichi - connected to an - then already - old Dynaco Integrated valve amlifier driving a pair of AR8s speakers. The sound was great!

I was working at Lafayette Radio's southern most company store (Forest Park, GA) while in school when I bought my first real system.

1975

Lafayette LR-2200
Lafayette Criterion 777 speakers
BIC 940 w/Shure M91ED cartridge

1976

Lafayette LR-3500 (from marketing literature "Massive 47 Watts RMS per channel")
JBL L-36 loudspeakers (still have them)
BIC 1000 w/ADC ???? cartridge
Kenwood KX-530 cassette deck

Moody Blues, Doobie Brothers, Pink Floyd, etc all sounded so good back then. Ah to be young with little or no cares in the world.

Several changes since them but still have some of the equipment, more changes are coming!

Really it was a Craig 8-track I bought from Bill Ursery when I was 13 for $50 because he needed the cash for his trip home from Northern California to Kentucky, (or was it Tenn.?), and with it came a pair of plastic, backless, 45* angle 5" fullrange(?) speakers which I mounted to my wall above my pillow so I could get the full 'true' stereo effect (Ooooh pleeeeease)
- But I learned to love Carly, Led Zep, Grand Funk, Cream, Jesse Colin Young and others which were right out of 1971-73 during this summer of '73.

In High School (a few years later) I bought a Concept 3.5 (which I still have in good looking/working condition!) from Pacific Stereo and then BUILT my 1st pair of speakers from Plywood and a pair of Altec 15" along with some E.V. 3500 horn tweeters I acquired from an older gentleman at Church.

That stinkin' system was so loud, full and efficient with the ported enclosures I built (at the ripe old age of 15) that I immediately became rather a well-known fixture as a Freshman who liked to hang out on the Senior lawn, and was allowed to.
-The reason? Because I was invited to all the Junior / Senior parties as long as I brought my stereo and 'DJ'd all night!

Now THAT was real fun; because I had the right stereo system I was a big man on campus as a FRESHMAN!!

Oh, what a fun little stroll down amnesia lane.

These days I often find time to enjoy my Soundlabs, Threshold S/500, and Studer CD, which aren't real upper end but set me free every time I off the lights and melt into the Ekornes with that hauntingly ethereal Mr. Hedges on guitar... Can't wait to hear him again live, but that won't be on an Earthly Stereo system.

We all miss you Michael.

hooked up my 13" black and white tv speaker wires. The sound was kind of "surround" due to signal mismatch....and wrong impedance as well. later I added a SONY 8-track tape deck! that was great for recording my own 8-track tapes in full stereo. Recorded my own Elvis music off the radio since there was no napster back then :)

Its time too show my age in the Hobby.

I've had a few bestbuy type systems in the past, but my first attempt at doing something different was a tri-amped system consisting of Sonic T-Amps.

I have a pair of Kinetic Audio speakers that allow for a tri-amped configuration.

I run two sonic t-amps with the left/right inputs mono'd together. This was run of a entech dac, fed by a cambridge audio CD player.

I then ran a third t-amp off the analog outputs for just the tweeters. I control the system with two Luminous Audio pre-amps.

The system is very un-conventional, a pain to adjust but very efficient.

Its no longer my primary setup, but I still enjoy it in a remote corner of my house, infact alot more than my previous BestBuy/Circuit city over-priced bargains.