Your First System

At my very early age I had phonograph with spring and one day I couldn't dial the spring and was listening to my records by simply spinning at near correct speed with my finger. Than I tried to fix it by taking it apart by putting together collapsed spring back into coils kneat, but it jumped out of chassis high up the ceiling. I was probably 5...6 and was VERY upset to tears that I wouldn't ever be able to spin my records manually. My dad than managed to get old WW2 times Telefunken console unit. After some small research he managed to get all tubes in place and start it up and it worked! Few to several years later I was able to troubleshoot it myself and replace tubes as necessary as this console I was using till my youth. The console had tuner, record player and 7" r2r tape player. By that time I learned circuits and kinematics of all 3 console components and knew how to fix issues.

I remember it very well, though it was way back in '69. A Garrard SL55 turntable with a Shure M91e cartridge, plugged into a Fisher X-100A integrated amp (tubed, of course), powering a pair of Acoustic Research 4ax's. I could actually still enjoy music through that system today!

I was 13 in 1975, and as many of you from that period have already said, I had a Technics 25wpc receiver, worked construction during the summer and bought a BIC turntable, with a $35 Altec Lansing cartridge. I was using some super cheap speakers from my dad's quadraphonic system (blew them up) until the end of summer when I bought some AKL towers at Harvey's Warehouse! I did replace the turntable with an ADC unit at some later date. But that system lasted me until after I was grown and married, I was probably 23 before I moved into the high end of audio. Or at least attempted to.

I must have been half asleep when I wrote that, it was an Audio Techica cartridge. But reading most of the other entries, it does seem to be a trend. Almost all of us started out in the mid-fi stereo of the 70's. I remember stores like Sight and Sound, Harvey's Warehouse, and later Circuit City, that sold good mid-fi equipment at affordable prices, perhaps this has something to do with why our hobby is dropping off? This starting point is missing. It's either surround sound systems for movie sound tracks, or nothing, until you jump straight into the big money stuff? Even though there may be affordable systems at your local salon, these shops that were in every local shopping center are gone, and one must seek out the rare salon, which can be intimidating to the uninitiated.

Let's see.....

There was a Marantz receiver with a horizontal thumb wheel. The was a BIC turntable. Strange, but I can't recall the speakers.

I do remember that my first high end speaker was the Kef Corelli and my first separates were from Audire. I bought the Audire Diffet Pre and ? Power amp at a steep discount from Crazy Eddie, a NYC based big box store that somehow briefly got hold of an Audire franchise.

There was also a Dual turntable in that system.