My story is fairly gear-based I'm afraid.

I always like the clunkyness and feel of my Dad's Aiwa deck and Yamaha receiver (nice heavy dial and clunky switches) but music wasn't big in my family home appart from the radio perhaps..

At school though, a couple of friends' dads were into hi-fi. One was a collector of older gear from boot sales and I was always jealous of all the gear, hi-fi and studio gear, that my friend picked up. I just like the new toy aspect of all the old gear plus he listened to a lot of music.

The other friend was actually Howard Popeck's son so hearing those M1s turned all the way up showed me what hifi could do! Mainly live albums (that his son played) came alive although I was always a bit on edge because of the volume, thinking someone would come round and complain. The gear on Howard's shelves facinated me too, especially the Nakamichi pre-amp he had at the time. All of it had been left on for about 23 years at the time - never ever switched off, never ever therefore failed.

Got into Ebay around 2001 and from there my knowledge of hifi grew and grew. It's only because of the internet that I've been able to persue it as a kind of hobby.

Now I'm swamped with stuff and often don't get to just sit and listen to music because there's too much hifi around distracting me. I'm trying to get rid of most of it, slowly.. err, think I'm addicted.