Your first component that was "special"

Thorens TD165, purchased in 1975 from Custom HiFi in Burlingame, CA.

Like vicweast and inna mentioned, my choice would be my Nakamichi 581Z cassette deck.  It wasn't the most reliable deck that Nakamichi ever designed and it spent quite a bit of time at the factory service facility in California in the '80s and '90s.  But when it was at the top of its' game it never ceased to amaze me with its' ability to make virtual carbon copies of my treasured vinyl collection. Over the years I made hundreds of tapes with it thus greatly reducing the wear 'n tear on my favorite LPs'.  

It's long gone but I have a Nak DR-2 that's far less fussy and the tapes recorded on the 581Z sound just as good when played on the DR-2.  FWIW, I'll always have a Nak deck in my system.

Hifijones, exactly. I have some very valuable to me records that are almost impossible to find. Accidents aside, no record with any turntable set-up will tolerate so many plays. As I said somewhere else here, I have one Maxell Vertex tape that I played at least 500 times, and dozens more with 200-300 plays on them. The same sound, no bleeding thru or anything. Now, despite using best tape and over $1k interconnect, my tuned and aligned deck cannot fully compete with Nottingham turntable but it is not far and with some recordings very close. One day I will have high end two track reel to reel deck in the system as the main source but I will keep the Nakamichi as well.

Shure V15-3 as well-still use it on second system!

Kenwood KA 6000 integrated. Sounded great with my AR5s and AR table. Until it became a red hot glowing cigar lighter. And it was solid state! My dealer simply replaced it with another one, and said something about being careful how hard I pushed it. Ha! No worry though, it was soon stolen!