I'll confess to being hooked on a desire for high quality audio since about 1967 in high school. The faculty advisor for our school yearbook was an audio nut recently graduated from college. He still lived with his parents at the time, but the basement was his for his audio use, and his pride and joy was a big Crown reel-to-reel tape recorder, a big Crown solid state amp and, in 1969 he acquired a pair of "new to the world" Magneplanar speakers. I remember being amazed at the sound those 1.5" thick Maggies could create from his tapes of live amateur performances. The best I could manage at the time was a suitcase style Magnevox combination turntable and radio: the speakers folded out on hinges (and you could remove them to place them farther apart) and the turntable, such as it was, folded down from the recess inside. Janis Joplin sounded so great to me over this thing And by the time I hauled it off to college, I'd acquired a Teac real to reel (big expenditure at the time) and had spent the summer bugging the devil out of various friends so I could dub their parentÂs classical LPs to tape to take with me.
At about this time, I found Stereophile and the every now and again publishing schedule of J Gordon Holt. And when The Absolute Sound got started, I was an early subscriber: probably Issue 3 as I recall, and, yes, I got the back issues to read what I'd already missed.
For me, the 1970s were an exciting time in audio. Seems like we were all learning (or re-discovering) so much about what made for great sound. Tubes were being recognized again in a few places for the great sound they'd always delivered, but that we'd forgotten in the rush to transistors. And many of us, me definitely included, were getting introduced to the concept that the turntable could have a dramatic impact on the sound quality we could get. Today that seems hard to imagine, but then Ivor was fighting virtually a lone uphill battle to convince everyone that his TT really did sound different and better than those direct drive thingies with the strobe lights.
My particular lust, around 1972, was for the drop dead gorgeous linear tracking, belt driven,
B&O Beogram 4000 turntable. Boy, talk about being blinded by the beauty of design  to me this turntable was a piece of sculpture worthy to grace any art gallery (and it did find its way to the Museum of Modern Art, I believe). But, this little mis-adventure also taught me a big time lesson about sonics versus styling. I gratified by visual aesthetics with the purchase of one of these jewels in 1974 (the
model 4002 by then), but when I traded up to an early VPI turntable some years later, became a much happier camper. (The one thing that did stick with me is a love for linear tracking tonearms.) IÂve never since considered the appearance of a piece of audio gear, just the sonics.
On the very positive side, at around the same time I purchased a used pair of the classic Marantz 9 tube amps on the recommendation of a friend. These amps were eleven or twelve years old at the time, and I paid a total of $360 for them. What a great investment they were as they graced my system for the next 25 years through several sets of speakers!
As much as I enjoyed the excitement of learning about high-fidelity in the late '60s through mid-'70s, and introduction of some great sounding gear (for its time) during this period, I think the world of high-end audio has never been better than it is today. I see a high degree of innovation, sound quality is vastly better for more components than ever before, the best components are simply better than ever before, and source material is superb. My system today is the best I've ever had, and I wouldn' go back to any prior system I've had (or that IÂve heard, for that matter).
And, one final really good thing about enjoying audio today is the online community we can enjoy, such as here at Audiogon and through email listserves. Today I'm able to share my enjoyment of this rather insane hobby with a sizeable group of like minded nuts, and that's very different (and better) than in past decades.
Cheers,
