Were you an audiophile in the 1980s and 1990s?

I bought my first separate preamplifier at Jonas Miller's LA boutique.  But it wasn't one they carried. 

The Lucky Audiophile

the new and better "golden age of audio" is right now!

Yes, I was an audiophile in the late 70s, and through the 80s and 90s... 

and my MVL, most valuable lesson:

bigger, fancier, more expensive does not equal better 

I started messing with hand me down tube amps in the sixties. Started buying my own in the seventies. Worked to much in the eighties though the two thousands and rekindled my trek in the twenty twenties. 
So happy to be back. So sad there are so few stores left! 

In the late 1990's Stereophile ran an article about the 300B "God's tube" single ended triode. You could buy as a kit or a schematic to build your own such SET from Cary Audio in North Carolina. I built my first SET and began my journey. The modern 300B tubes had cheaper inferior cathodes to the coveted Western Electric 300B tubes so the price for scarce Western Electric 300B tubes went to hell. However, the less powerful 2A3 sounded richer, but NOS 2A3's were less available. The 45 globe triodes, or the 245 globe triodes were made the same way the Western Electric 300B was made and were affordable but they are less powerful. Eventually someone I thought was crazy built and sold 833A radio station transmitter tube SET amplifiers costing $350,000. The 833A was driven by a 300B. The circuit was simple and I was ready to change from complicated box speakers to Magnapan 0.7's which circumvented all the problems of box speakers. 0.7's could not be driven by 45 SET's but I could keep my SET sound if I used my 45's to transformer drive the grids of 833A's and Hammond made a perfect output transformer for the 833A that could insulate up to 4000 Volts the modest 1000 Volts I used for the plates of the 833A's. 

I never went back to factory built amplifiers since I started my 300B journey. 

@bdp24 100% I even built a custom designed dedicated listening room using J.Gordon Holt article on wall construction using activated carbon filtering for bass. He was a visionary beyond all other writers.

As to being an audiophile in the 80s and 90s, I may have been but was unable to execute sound quality commensurate with my desires until the 2000s due to financial constraints. The best thing I owned was a highly modified SME IV arm, then a VPI 19-4 table. I don’t consider my ML Monolith 3s as very good. I did own AR SP14 with an AR Classic 60 amp in the 90s but had typical bad cabling so that ruined the sound quality.

"What I DID say was that metric can not be used when the source material used in the evaluation of components is not a recording made with the intention of capturing "the sound of unamplified instruments in a real space", but is instead a recording made to merely sound "good". What does "good" mean? In the world of Pop music recording, if you think good means "the sound of unamplified instruments in a real space", well then you obviously haven’t spent much time in a recording studio." 

As a partime amateur recording engineer of 200+ performances at Disney Hall, Royce Hall, Ford Theater, etc. and many remastering engineer friends well known to the audiophile community, you are absolutely correct.  While I may have made many true to life recordings, with 48,000+ LPs/CD/78s/R2R, most of my recordings were "manufactured" to capture studio "performances for home (or inferior car/portable player) listening.  It is an entirely different experience than listening to live music (I share Holt's preference for classical although my collection includes a vast amount of jazz, opera, pop, rock to 1990 and ethnic).  I've also appraised 17 SoCal sound studios (and made a few recordings as well) and know something about creating a final listening product.