When did it all start?

I was nine years old (1970) and won a contest selling the most new newspaper subscriptions door-to-door in my neighborhood. I won one of those all in one crappy systems but I loved it, listened to music night and day in my room. Over the next 4 years I cut lawns, baby-sat, shoveled snow, painted houses, etc and saved my cash. Every Saturday I'd go downtown Montreal to buy records and kept passing by this small audio shop with some cool looking gear in the window. One day I passed by and it was quiet so I wandered in so see/hear what this stuff was. The owner was a young guy and enthusiastic about audio and spent a fair amount of time educating me on what gear he sold, what made one amp better than another, speakers (electrostatic vs. boxes), you name it. Quite something, taking the time to educate a 13 year old kid with a couple of used records under his arm and unlikely to have any money. He carried Quad, Thorens, Mission, B&W, and a new product called New Acoustic Dimensions (NAD). Great guy, Claude got me hooked on audio for life. My first real system was the venerable Thorens TD147 with stock arm and Supex 900 pickup, Mission 700 speakers, and a NAD3020 integrated. Let's just say the time he took to share his audio passion with a young kid sure paid off for him over the years. I still patronize Sound Ideas and we became good friends over the years.

Beatles? S&G? 1972? What were you smoking, there, at 11? Being 11 in '72 and 11 in '64--I was watching the Beatles, on Ed Sullivan, singing I Want to Hold Your Hand. Man, was that something. Shindig, Hullabaloo, the Smothers Brothers. Here I go again. peace, warren

Circa 72, when in my early teens I heard a system that one of my moms younger hippie brothers took in as payment on some plant products he was distributing at the time, an integrated Marantz receiver with built in tt, and a pair of 3 way speakers of unknown brand and scratched out serial numbers. I walked into his room as Zeppelins Levee was blaring away and I was hooked. Ironically, I bought the system from him a few years later when he needed some quick scratch to get out of town and moved to Tempe,AZ for "business". I can't recall what I did with that Marantz, possibly the result of saidsame plant products. It was a beauty with an excellent receiver. I really wish I knew what I did with it.......

Marakanetz...

I don't recall that cables and interconnects were anything special. In fact, I wonder if the word "interconnect" was ever used in 1978....

I imagine the interconnects were whatever crap came with the individual components. I do recall that his speaker cables looked like regular brown electrical cord. woo-hoo!! take about "hi-fi"!

cheers!

ps....I'm a little surprised that no one was curious enough to ask what the song was that started all of my reminiscing.

Why, what does a dumb young kid know??? Maybe all the talk about them seemed like they were still together. Remember this was my intro!
I do remember hearing about Jim Morrison dying though... then the DJ played 'Riders on the Storm.' Or maybe I just think I remember it. It was strange days.