What was the first system you heard that made you think the high end made sense

Houston, 1982, Audio Concepts.
 Linn LP-12, Mark Levinson, Magnepans.
Unbelievably wonderful sound.

Tom

Actually when I put together my first seperates, all adcom, amps, cd, processr and Polk srs sda 3.1TL. 1984 man I was in heaven. Since then I've come a long way and invested way too much in trial and error. Only remaining pieces are the Polk in my HT system and 1 adcom 555II as spare, just in case.

In 1971 I was only 11 and had a garage sale to raise money for a better stereo. $320 later I got a Pioneer receiver and a pair of Rectilinear 10B speakers from Tech Hi-Fi. Now I'm not saying they were high end, but at age11 they were the coolest. The weird thing is while my current system blows the original away, my memory tells me I was more impressed with my first one.

1969, Dynaco ST-70, Dynaco PAS3, AR Xa TT, AR3a speakers.  

I was with a coworker who needed to stop by his mothers house while we where out. His step father was a modest fellow who drove a Lays Chips delivery truck, the house was a typical modest middle class home. While there my coworker asked if we could listen to his step dads set up. His space was a 12x12 room with a sofa toward the rear at center but well off the rear wall, with obvious room treatments. He was running Magnepans, a single two channel amp, a very basic pre, basically a volume controller, a CD player, and a 8inch bass cube. He mentioned he was running everything to follow the shortest path from the CD player to the speakers using only what was absolutely needed. He played Dire Straits Brother in Arms, it was fantastic. I immediately questioned the system I had at the time, a Best Buy Pioneer AV receiver with low end Klipsch towers. I got home fired it up and literally said to myself (this sounds like bad) and thus that’s where it started, Damn that guy.