Which components knocked you out on first listen?

The first real stereo I ever heard... 1972
Kenwood KR-6160 90 wpc driving Pioneer CS88 speakers- ..source material an Akai reel to reel.

The second- 1975- in a stereo store- Luxman 1050 receiver driving ADS 810s with a Denon turntable

nothing has sounded so good since

Bose 901 with Macintosh amps. (I'm old)
Hill Plasmatronics
Beveridge Model 1
Stax Class 45 watt per channel amp with Dahlquist DQ10
Infinity Beta with Audio research
Apogee Scintilla with Krell
Sequerra tuner with Stax Lambda phones
Pass Labs 30 watt single ended

Dannylw:

You're not THAT old. The 901s were IT back when. Compared to the regular stuff that floated around at the time they were considered amazing.

Driving DQ10s with 45WPC? Wow, imagine what they would have sounded like with sufficient power to open them up. My old SAE amp had "just enough" for my DQ10s (a speaker I still miss and fondly remember) at 125/side.

F7

It was a Stax Class A with 45 watts per channel. I had heard the DQ10 many times before but never like that. The speakers finally lived up to the articles I was reading. And just for the record I had an SAE 4C for a long time. I no longer own the SAE but it still doing daily duty.

Proac response 2.5's driven with sonic frontiers power 3's...wow, the image they created was 3 dimensional, for real, it was like you could walk around the saxophonist and he had physicality to him!! not to mention the amazing bass for such an unassuming speaker

Totem modle 1's driven by cary triods...i have yet to hear diana krall sound better, on any system

Wilson Grand Slamms with Krell FPB 600...that was an eye opener on how good audio can get, yet you'd expect it to be good cause it costs 100x what the totem/cary system cost.

in that sense i was much more floored by the other two systems.