How did you get into this hobby?

I was in Milwaukee for the weekend and decided to stop by the ole stomping grounds. My grade school was still there as was most of the assorted debris. Even then it was a collecting point for vagrants!

I rounded the corner where I had met the friendly stranger and there was a big black car up on blocks. The hood had long since been pried up and the motor was stripped. The windows were busted out, and Wisconsin winters had obviously taken their toll on the body.

"What's the deal with that car?" I asked one of the debris lounging against the door of a Chinese restaurant.
"Weirdest thing..." the man began and then trailed of starring into space.
"Yeah." I prompted
"Oh, uhm, the car was just there one day. Big old cracker sittin' in back. Said he was waitin' for someone. Just sat there, for years. Said some guy was comin' back. Maybe he died or sumthin' cuz the cars been sittin' there for a long time, but he ain't been around for... years, I guess."
With that the old vagrant belched, soiled himself and wandered off. I thought he left just in time.

I felt kinda bad. All that time the gentleman waited for his money. I don't even have any of that stuff anymore. I thought about bringing the old California Audio Labs Icon Mk II down and leaving it in his car, but I knew romantic notions like that serve no real purpose.

I closed the hood of the car and headed back to my hotel, where by the way Oprah was speaking to the local NAACP chapter. Not a parking space in sight. Poetic Justice? You decide!

experience. However, I got into it when I was stuck in the military in Germany and, since "hi-fi" equipment was relatively cheap and the ONLY SOURCE OF IN-HOUSE entertainment -- coupled with a lot of time on our hands -- a bunch of us started sniffing around and discovered the wonders of what Tommy583 correctly ID'd as a sickness. However, once you first HEAR music reproduced in a quality fashion, the infection has hold and there's usually no turning back. I've actually been in remission a couple of times over the years but the recurrence overwhelms and here I go again. Having just come out of one such remission, I find myself rebuilding the same system piece by piece trying to maximize the sound. All within some arbitrary and completely overstretched budgetary considerations. Then, there's the WAF or GFAF to consider. Ah well, the sounds that emanate from the equipment blind us all to the realities of the expense and anguish over the decisions and choices.

F7

I loved music from very young, and listened to hundereds of great LP's and 8-tracks with my older brother growing up. I loved working the buttons on our cheapo mini-system (late 70's). The seeds were planted.

Then, I watched my father build our first home system -- a receiver (Nikko), tape deck (Nikko), truntable, and two speakers (Advent). I read all the Stereo Review magazines that came into our house during that time and began dreaming (early 80's). Germination...

When CD's came out I used money from a summer job to buy one of the first trickle-down CD players and some cool silver discs (Peter Gabriel's "So" was my first CD). I hooked it up to the Nikko receiver in our house stereo. Sprouting...

In 1987 I bought my first system (Kyocera, Adcom, Magnepan).

Probably 7 sets of speakers, 5 different combinations of amplifiers, 10 different digital configurations, 10's of different kinds of cables, racks, power conditioners and the like later (and 15 years), and it goes on, Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring, -- Its been a great ride.

I found the tweeter in my mono 8-track player didn't quite meet my expectation.I took it apart and had my father take my to rat shack and picked up a couple and finally setted in on one I liked.That was thirty five years ago.It hasn't stopped.

Not unlike Kgvet, I wanted to hear the damn cymbals on my Yes Relayer LP, and my El Plastico Panasonic single driver speaks wouldn't do it. Cannibalized a set of exponential horn loaded tweets from a set of dead BIC speakers, glued those bad boys ontop, wired up a crude crossover and was off to the races. That was 1973 and the beat goes on.