What made you become an 'audiophile'.

Doesn't matter if you think you aren't one, or your system 'doesn't measure up', if you're here, you are one.

For me it was my dad who at the time, when I was a young kid, was working class but apparently spent most of his expendable $ on stereo gear. Over time as he became an executive, the system got better & better. His stereo became the Buick in Rain Man. I (Tom Cruise) always wanted to drive my friends around in it but dad wouldn't let me touch it. I couldn't wait for mom & dad to go out at night so I could see what Queen & early Motley Crue sounded like on 8' tall electrostatics powered by Audio Research amps. (As it turns out quite nice! )

So he wouldn't buy crappy stereo gear for me. It wasn't great, but it was better than the 'record players' & or rack systems from Sears that my friends had. It was NAD gear and Infinity speaks. The bug was planted.

When I started to get a little bit of money, I went more the home theater route than critical listening stereo, but music listening was always a very important part of my life & audio quality has been huge for me. The gear and room are 'rarely' good enough. One evening I LOVE my system, the next listening session I hate it. & so it goes.

Last week I added a turntable for the first time in about 20 years & started putting together a 2-channel system and the fire has been lit again.

What's your story?

 

I had a friend who had some apogee speakers, cj preamp and I think an aragon amp set up in his basement. the room was well suited for it, and once I heard that I basically had the bug.

 

it was the first time i heard "astral weeks" .

 

When I was in grade school (grade 7 or 8) in the early '70s a classmate was given a reel-to-reel deck and I got to see it. It was then that I realized what real stereo equipment was. It opened up the exposure to something other than my parent's console stereo (remember those!). But I'm still not an audiophile, can't afford it! yet!

 

I was a kid, about 12 years old, and was selling a old Magnavox CD player through the classifieds of the local newspaper. I got a call from an older gentleman, not wanting to buy it but to encourage me to keep it. Apparently it was a pretty decent piece of gear. After talking to him for 30 minutes, he extended an invitation for my mom and I to come by his home and listen to my CD player in his system. When I arrived, the first thing I noticed was that his speaker cables were the size of a garden hose. I sat and listened to vinyl and CDs through his system for almost 2 hours. I was in complete awe of what a good setup sounded like. On the drive home, I distinctly recall my face hurt. Upon commenting to my mom, she mentioned that I had the biggest smile on my face for the entire audition.

I'll likely never be able to achieve the level of sound I heard from that system on that day when I was 12. Not because it was that stellar of a system but because my memories of that experience changed my world forever.

 

Not sure, really... as far back as I can remember I paid a lot of attention to the details of the music I listened to -- how things were mixed, why one album sounded better than another, etc. Music has never been a casual endeavor for me, be that listening or playing.

 

When the McMaster Blue Note CDs started coming out I was listening to them on a Sharp stereo. I suspected better sound quality could be had since those discs already sounded pretty decent on that small stereo. I still have that stereo (it still works and I have it tuned in to NPR in our gym), we couldn't bring ourselves to throw it away when we made the big transcontinental move

All downhill since then... countless headphones, amps, speakers, turntables, etc

 

The devil!

Who else would inflict such a thing

Hmm...maybe I'm thinking about the internet meets the audiophiles.

 

Sitting at a tech bench at Alesis and looking at all those Quadraverbs and Midiverbs and wondering what can be done to make them stand up to a Lexicon.

 

I always had an interest in music - my dad was a choir director and collected music, so it was always playing in the house.

But the day I became an audiophile was because of a guy who was two grades ahead of me. He was friends with my best friend, who said we had to drive over and check out this new stereo. This was some time in 1985ish when I saw my first tube amplifier - a pair of McIntosh MC-60s driving Magnepan speakers. Preamp was a C-20 (I believe) and the turntable was a Thorens TD-124. I really don't remember how it sounded, but the idea of an exotic stereo kind of stuck in my craw. Until then, I thought my dad's Akai receiver and locally built tower speakers were about as good as it could get.

It wasn't until a few years later - 1989 - that I went over to the same guy's house. He was out of high school by then and had upgraded his speakers to Quad ESL-63 electrostats. Amplifier was a heavily modified McIntosh 240 running GEC KT88s and a separate power supply regulator for the output stage, the input stage, and even the bias supply. It was some weird Frankenstein collection modified by the local tube guru with Vitamin Q couplers and whatnot. Preamp was a Dynaco PAS-3X (!) modified with no tone controls and Vitamin Q caps; along with an outboard power supply regulator. Turntable was a VPI HW19 Mark III with an ET2 tonearm. Anyway, he threw on some Beatles and I had one of those "a-ha! moments" when I started hearing detail and information in the recording that I had never heard before. The electrostat speakers were like a window into the performance and it sounded so real, unlike the canned lo-fi I was used to.

It was that day that I asked him if I could buy a tube amp - it turned out to be a Dynaco 70 - and I haven't been the same since.

 

Noticing how much different live music sounded compared to what I was hearing on 1960s mass market "record players". And later the horrible sound of pre-recorded cassette tapes.

 

It's really hard to say, but by the time I was 14 I was already building my own stereo system. The start for me came in Jun 59 when I inherited my Uncle Jerry's AM radio. I didn't realize it at the time, but that changed my life significantly. I was just about to turn 7 at that time.

I got my first store bought stereo in Jun 68. I selected it strictly using my ears. I looked at dozens of those all in one units and the one I selected was miles ahead of the others sonically. I don't know how I had the ability to make that determination, but apparently I already had some of the skills that I'd end up using to make my living. I did take three years of electronics in high school, got all A's and became the teacher's pet. I give a lot of credit to that teacher, Mr. Elliot for inspiring me and giving me a platform from which to develop my skills.

I should mention that I did some mods to that all in one stereo to make it sound better, learning quite a bit in the process. When I moved away to college in Sep 70 I still had that all in one GE unit, but quickly decided to upgrade. There were quite a few stereo rigs in the dorms, but most of them sounded like crap. They mostly were based on cheap 12" 3 way no name speakers systems and I was not at all impressed.

I decided to buy a new pair of AR6 speakers, for $140 and found a used Kenwood integrated 40 watt amp and a Garrard SL-95B table for another $100 and there I was. That modest looking system sounded far better than any of the dorm systems and most people were absolutely shocked that I'd go for smaller speakers, but they sounded pretty big to me when set up right. There was plenty of bass when there should have been, but not much when it wasn't present.

This rig only lasted for about a year until I got a pair of AR3a's, a Marantz 2270 and a Thorens TD-160. I did sell my old gear to a good friend, so it was never too far and it continued to impress most who heard it. That new system cost me about $1100 dollars, which was a small fortune for a 19 years old college student. Most of my friends thought I was out of my mind but I knew I was on the right track. About this time I started making my live recordings which lead to a huge learning spurt.

I guess I was somewhat of an audiophile at this point, but who really knows. I surely don't remember hearing that term until many years after that. I guess when you're at the point where others start to talk about your system and bring their friends to hear it, you're probably an audiophile. If so, I've been there since 1971.

 

How about making them stand up to a EMT 250.

 

Everyone around me was always using Lexicon as the benchmark in the late 80's through early 90's.

 

Oh, for me it was my dear old Dad, undoubtedly. He was an electrical engineer and a life-long amateur radio operator and electronics buff. He had some records and a system with a mid-fi receiver and speakers, and an old Garrard turntable. He wasn't into the high end as we know it today, but he had a subscription to Audio magazine, which of course I devoured as a youngster, just because it was lying around in my house and it was such a cool hobby. He was also the sound engineer, tape recordist and sound booth operator at our church (Central Lutheran in Minneapolis) when I was growing up. He engineered a couple of recordings for our world-class choir and organist in their huge gothic church. He encouraged me when I became interested in audio (and radio) at a young age. God bless him. We did some electronic build projects together at home in our basement, and I remember those times so very fondly. When I was older, in college, and had gained some knowledge about audio equipment, I recommended a good value phono cartridge (Shure M91ED) and some headphones (the original Sennheiser HD414s) for him to buy and he was very happy with those purchases.

In high school and college, I worked part time at an independent retail record shop. Contracted an addiction to vinyl records and all sorts of adventurous music there in the 70s.

 

I wanted something better sounding than a boom box. I always like going to people's homes where there was a stereo and music playing.

 

Oh, I forgot about to mention that in 6th grade my dad helped me build an electronic organ. No this wasn't a kit. We built an oscillator and used tin foil keys to change capacitance values for a node of the circuit. It was monotonic and poorly tuned, but I could play music on it. I got an 'O' in science for that one.

It was my first electronic project other than melting solder into shiny blobs.

My dad was a physicist. He built a lab of sorts in our basement but it never really amounted to much., though it was a lot of fun for me to play around in. We even had an oscilloscope, though it took me a few years to figure out what it actually did. At some point I got to the point where I knew more about audio than my dad, and he didn't like that one little bit.

 

After college, I worked for Circuit City for a time being back in the mid 90's when they used to carry some decent stuff....Onkyo, Harman Kardon, etc.....was there when they also sold Carver gear for a short time. Anyway, I was wandering through Hifi Buys in Atlanta one day when one of the sales guys (I guess he was bored or something...I was pretty young and didn't look like I could afford anything nice) asked me if I wanted to check out their high end gallery.......it was called the Sound Gallery at Hifi Buys at the time. I walked into their room and the main system was a Classe preamp with their 40o w/ch Classe CA-400 driving a pair of Sonus Faber Extremas which were some of the best loudspeakers available then (I didn't have a clue). So he asked me if I had any music with me and I did, I had a stack of CDs in the car and of course one of them was Dire Straits Brothers in Arms and also a Telarc copy of Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. So he dims the lights and plays Your Latest Trick......holy crap, I had never heard anything like that in my life. I was sitting there trying to find the center channel and all the other speakers in the room, but there were only the 2 Extremas. He played the Copland piece where the drums literally hit you in the chest and that was it. I've been hooked ever since.


-Buck

 

I grew up in home with McIntosh tube pre-amp and solid state amp. I remember playing pool and spinning Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bad Company, Gerry Rafferty, etc. with my dad, and those are some of my best memories as a kid. The bug had bitten me, and I've loved good music and good equipment ever since.

 

I liked music early on, I was always the one dialing in stations on my parents car radio.

As far as playback equipment......As a kid I used to like to go to the city dump and find old TV's or console stereos and pull out the speakers if they still looked good, I'd take them home and build crude boxes for them. I got into the electronics side when I got a RadioShack 100 in 1 electronics kit for my 9th birthday. Once I discovered Dynakits it was all over for me.

 

No ones gonna be brave and say "this place" huh

 

I did the same in both cases. I collected junk speakers and had them all over my bedroom. I even built a switching network so I could turn them on and off separately. Funny but this was before I knew how to solder, so I just twisted my wires together around the lugs and taped them tight.

I'm happy to report that my electronics skills improved considerably since then, but my ability to drill straight holes to mount the switches is still pretty poor.

When I built my first stereo, as mentioned upthread, I hooked up groups of these speakers just to see how they would sound. I built my own cabinets out of cardboard boxes I'd find, some small and some larger. For a while I even had a 15" speaker in a big box. Man did it have the bass compared to my other speakers.

I also loved to sit in my parent's car and listen to the radio, but it was rare that they'd let me do that. My uncles' on my mom's side all had Caddy's and when they come to visit they'd often let me sit in their cars and play with their radios. That was pure joy for me.

 

Always had decent stereo gear and buying LP's was what I did with my allowance cash..lol .
So it went for decades and even trying to become a bedroom DJ and buying 2 Tecnics a mixer an a PAfor that. Still had my trusted old living room Stereo but somehow upgrading from Yamaha to NAD amp and reading audiophile magazines / HiFi forums esp. this one here sparked my interest and I sold my DJ gear to get decent HiFi. Hearing music styles I never cared much for - classical and Jazz helped a lot in learning to value good gear more and more. The rest is obvious, once you are on the path to audio heaven you cannot stop..

 

This place really helped, but for me, I started in 1992. Just before the internet took hold of everything.