I had my first system in Russia that consisted of
Amphiton amplifier(now known hear as Lamm),
S50 bookshelves,
Mayak 205 reel-to-reel,
Electronica record-player(with built-in phono) and Supex cart(don't remember the precice model)
To say I liked this system is too trivial since I almost never was satisfied with performance and always was modding source, speakers and amp as well taking advices from various russian radio DIY journals.
I started to like my first system when I immigrated to US and bought simple boombox and bundle of CDs:(. I couldn't stand this Sanyo box for even 10min and bought walkman that could offer me much more for the same amount of money. Vintage studio Koss earphones were later-on added getting music even more real and live. For another several years sneaking arround different thrift shops and garage sales, looking for a budget components of the brand names I dreamed back in Russia such as Fischer, Pioneer, Technics, Kenwood and actually aiming to start building the system here, I couldn't realy get a descent piece of equipment that could come even little-to-close to that system performance assembled in Russia...
And here goes my first system here:
Pocket walkman with extracted line output wires directly soldered onto unbalanced plugs fed to the vintage Marantz receiver with vintage Infinity bookshelf speakers. All these components were acquired free from the super's basement except walkman that by that time only started to appear in the stores and was quite expencive(near$100).
It was descent and I was glad that I was than able to listen with no headphones.
