Where did it all start for you? The music and hi-fi thing I mean.

[Spectral Morn]

Excellent! Well done Neil!

My was pretty spectatular. I was holding each side of the u-shaped metal casing with both hands and the shock caused both hands to grip the case so hard that the metal edge sliced straight into both hands at the same time.

There was blood

There was swearing

There was me looking like a complete tit at school having to explain my both my hands were in bandages.

However I haven't zapped myself since.

No blood in my case, some swearing, and a lot of hand rubbing to try and get the sensation back into it. The finger tips were particularly sore.

I once got blown across a patio, faulty cable inside a drill which I had been using via a wire brush attachment to remove rust from patio furniture. That was bad, blackened fingers and a heart that had launched into orbit, or so it felt. I lay thinking I was dead (sure give away I wasn't, assuming theres no thinking after death), would not want to experience that again.


Regards D S D L

[Puffin]

I grew up in Sarf Lundon and lived just off Lavender Hill. In 1966 I ventured into an alladin's cave of all things Vinyl, a shop called the "Slipped Disc". It had racks and racks of 45s, most of which had large holes in the middle. I later found out that that was because they were American Imports (you had to have a "Spider" to use it in the U.K). My first two 45s were Sittin on The Dock of The Bay, Otis Redding and Soul Man, Sam & Dave on the Blue Stax label (about the only 45s I still have)

We had an old HMV Radiogram which was housed in a very fine piece of furniture. I would love to know now if it was a valve amp in it, but it was binned many years ago.

My sister was 3 years older than me. Initially we only owned the top of the house and our lounge was at the front of the house, overlooking the street. My sister used to get her friends out in the street and I would open the windows and push the 'gram up to the winodws and I would be "the record man" (later to be known as a DJ of course). I would turn the thing up full blast and sister and friends would dance in the street (quite literally) to early Motown stuff that she was into.

The Motown and Soul sounds were all I wanted to hear and progressed to the legendary Stax "This Is Soul" album and on to all manner of Soul, Funk, Jazz-Funk etc. I was always taken by the immediacy and brutality of Disco systems. I started work at 17 and scraped enough money together to buy a "Disco" set up. When I think now how bad it was it is laughable, but it went LOOUUDD! and that was all that mattered.

My bedroom system consisted of an Eagle 15w per channel amp and a Garrard SP25Mk11. Speakers were quite unusual. At the time I was working in Knightsbridge and the Kings Road was only a jump away. B&O systems were often teamed with Large Spherical white speakers made by a company called Sykes and Hirsch (US I think) they were like large footballs. An old friend at school whose family had pots of money were constantly up-grading his hifi, and he sold them to me. Sounded quite good, but could not take much power.

My dad was then offered a Pye valve amp and some large home-made speakers. I inherited the speakers after I got married and parents moved to a smaller house. Turns out they had Goodmans Axiom units in them. I sold them years ago before I knew what call there was for the Axiom drive units.

My first serious amp was an Audiolab 8000A. I didn't buy a CD player unit about 1992 a Phillips 610MK11. Brilliant player that only died this year. Speakers were Wharfedale Diamonds, Mission 760MK11s, and a gang of others before making my own horns in 2006.

[Jason P]

Ahhh, memories, memories. Like so many on here my parent's taste in music was... shall we say non-existant? The had a few James Last LPs, a number of Readers Digest boxed sets and the odd film theme. Oh, and a motley collection of 45s that ranged from the sublime (Space Oddity) to the ridiculous (New Seekers).

We played these on high days & holidays, occasionally listening to radio as well. Now, about the same time I got bought a Sharp boom-box for Christmas, and mounted it on the shelf above my desk, listening to Radio 1 as I whiled away the hours building Airfix kits. The proximity of speakers with perfect stereo positioning, allied with copious amounts of noxious glue (looking back I was always slightly zonked when making kits ) made me all too aware that there was a world of stereo out there.

So I started reading up. I'd hang around Laskeys hi-fi department, hoping to get a play on some kit - it made a welcome change from spending a couple of hours typing a program into their ZX-81 only to find it did something crappy like make 'Hello' bounce round the screen. I ventured upstairs in our local photographic shop, discovering a cornucopia of champagne-coloured separates. I stole my brother's albums - mainly Mike Oldfield, Jean-Michelle Jarre and some band called Pink Floyd, who'd had that funny song out that they banned us from singing at school. Sumfink abaht educashyun.

I took a keen interest in setting up Mum & Dads system better - it too was a Garrard SP25 with an Eagle receiver, mated to some Pye speakers if memory serves. It was crap. But it was still HiFi!! Sitting between the speakers, lifted up off their normal home on the floor on temporary piles of books, I could detect the hint of stereo imaging and detail as I played my ever growing album collection - Nik Kershaw, Visage, Howard Jones... (I was a new romantic at heart although far too scared to wear the clothing or makeup).

One day I was hanging around outside a scary 'proper' hifi shop in Chichester, when the owner beckoned me in, telling me it was fine to have a look around and he didn't bite. He was playing some folk music by a guy called Christy Moore. It was a Rega Planar 3 through a Creek amp and Royd speakers - I'd never heard the like. To me, he was there. I went straight round to Our Price and bought the album (Ride On - still ace!)

Eventually I convinced Mum & Dad that they should get with it, and after much to-ing and fro-ing they bought a new system - a NAD 3130 and a pair of Heybrook HB1s. I saved like mad and bought a new turntable - a Dual 505 Deluxe, no less. I can remember clearly taking the train to London, all of 14 years old, and buying it in a hifi shop somewhere in the Mecca that is Tottenham Court Road, and having to walk back from there to Victoria as I'd blown my spare cash on a record cleaner.

I used to race RC buggies as a hobby, and my friend John (who was about 40, but my Mum & Dad didn't mind - social services would have a field day now!!) had a - all bow down - Linn system. LP12, LK1&2, Index speakers. Wow... this was the pinnacle. I vowed to have my own Linn one day...

It's been a slippery slope ever since, but I guess I've always been chasing after that feeling you get when the room around you disappears and all you're left with is the music. Funny how things come round though - I'm back to using the amp my M & D bought all those years ago.

Jason

[Joe]

We didn't have a record player till I was 10, and I didn't own any records till I was 12, but we used to listen to the the likes of The Stones, Them, and early blues stuff round at my cousin's, who had a) his own room and b) his own record player.

We pestered our parents till they bought a Fidelity multi-changer record player, plus a tape recorder so we could tape 'Pick of the Pops' off the radio.

Then my sister got a 'stereo' (ie a music centre plus two speakers) for her 18th birthday and I was hooked, listening to Hendrix, Who, John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac, lying on the sitting room floor with a speaker either side of my head.

My own first record player was a few years coming, but I started off with a Rotel (badged, appropriately enough 'Rank') stereo plus BSR turntable bought from Curry's with holiday work earnings. Once I got a 'proper job' I bought a Goodman's tuner/amp and RB35 speakers from Comet in Bexleyheath- well OTT for the tiny bedsit in Greenwich where I lived in at the time.

The rest is (slightly blurred) history.

[Beechwoods]

Really fantastic posts people. Thank you. It's great to read this stuff!

I like to think that my parents - my dad at least (sorry mum) - had great music taste, and a passion for Hi-Fi and audio DIY and that helped get me on the straight and narrow at an early age. My dad bought his main source, a Garrard 301 in 1969, and built a tonearm out of balsa for it. It was mounted in a wide, low, cabinet that some might call a radiogram, that he'd made himself. The pre and poweramp were also home-made. And a Heathkit tuner, homemade again obviously. The speakers were big 2 foot by 4 foot home-made things that were to go to my school when they were retired in the mid-80s. That was our system til the early 80's when the radiogram was broken for scrap and my dad built a new system in an 'upright' configuration, new power-amp and passive switching system, and homemade KEF cabs pretty much identical to the ones I am using now, which we made together when I was about 16.

I made my initial entrance in February of 1973, but that didn't appear to distract my dad who made some of his best vinyl purchases in that year. Dark Side Of The Moon, the Suck It And See Vertigo double-LP comp, and Together, a fantastic compilation of CBS stuff which to this day is one of the most influential albums on my musical upbringing, ever. I now have 2 copies of my own. Lovely blue vinyl

My first musical memory was from 1979 - 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' by Ian Dury & The Blockheads. I must have heard this on the radio because my folks didn't have it. Around this point I started getting into some of the other stuff my parents listened to. Sky, and Pink Floyd (Dark Side - my dad didn't have any others by them). I would dance round the living room playing air-guitar to Sky 2. I still have a strong soft-spot for Kevin Peek and Co.

Sometime in the early 80's - probably around age 10, I was given a Tandy cassette recorder. A mono thing probably designed to play computer tapes into an early home computer. I used this to record theme tunes off TV, and to archive episodes of Knight Rider, The Whizz Kids, Airwolf and The A-Team in the years before VCR! In 1984 I spent my birthday money on my first album, on cassette, to be played in my Tandy tape recorder. It was Synchronicity by The Police, and I got that one because a friend at school played 'Walking On The Moon' in a class once, and I thought it was a great tune. It was perhaps a shame it wasn't on the album I'd just bought, but I played it death anyway! That tape would eventually be lost leaping over a mountain stream in the Pennines wearing my walkman (sans dodgy door) c. 1989!

That album was to be the only one I owned for 2 years. In early 1986 I must have spent my Christmas money on Now... That's What I Call Music 6. Not quite as essential as my earlier purchase, it was to last me another year or so, as I was rapidly developing my own sense of musical identity.

I'd also decided it was about time that I had a better system than the Tandy tape deck I'd been using. It must have been my 13th birthday, or maybe the slightly earlier in Christmas of 1984, that I was given my first proper bit of music making equipment. It was a Sanyo 'ghetto-blaster' with a 5 band EQ, single tape well, radio, AUX-in / out and detachable speakers. This would last me 4 or 5 years.

In late 1987 I woke up to the sounds of indie-pop. I fell in love with Bjork, who was getting airplay on The Chart Show Indie Top 10 with The Sugarcubes. Birthday is a fantastic single to this day. I bought their album in early 1988, along with ones by The House Of Love, My Bloody Valentine, Pop Will Eat Itself. I bought my first vinyl records... Wild Hearted Woman by All About Eve (my first 12", along with Def Con One - Doomsday Powermix limited promo 12" by PWEI both bargain bin purchases for 50p each from Sounds Around in Kidderminster ) and 'You Make Me Feel' by The Woodentops, my first 7". I didn't have a turntable so they would be surreptitiously played on my dad's Garrard, and copied to tape. He hated me playing 'high groove modulation' 12" 45's on his deck because he was worried about the stylus!.

I would stay up until 10 or 11 at night to tape John Peel and edit the best tracks down onto a stack of C90's most of which I still have to this day. In early '89 I pursuaded my dad to help me beef up my system. We built a pair of KEF-driven speakers and he made a 100W 4 mosfet power-amp to be driven by my Sanyo ghetto blaster. Bypassing the horrible detachable speakers made a world of difference. My system was already miles better than that of my mates. My dad had bought the Sanyo wisely - it may have been a ghetto blaster but it was a good machine and more importantly it was upgradeable. In late 1989 I augmented it with my dad's Sony component tape deck which was only ever being used by me anyway by this point!

The Shamen, Fields Of The Nephilim, Ultra Vivid Scene, Dinosaur Jnr, The Pixies, Ozric Tentacles, The Wonderstuff... through Peel, Wired and Snub I was discovering a whole world of music. I tried my hand at Goth, but unlike today where every 15 or 16 year old looks like a teenie Goth, I was a little more unusual. And I didn't do it very well. I'd do my eye make up at a friends, then get bollocked by my parents when I got home in case the neighbours thought I was (how can I put it) a lady boy or something

So I just grew a bowl haircut like Guy Chambers from House Of Love.

In 1990 all my mates caught up with me and wanted to borrow the music they'd scorned me for for the last 2 years. That was a fun time. And we started to go to gigs. The Wedding Present, PWEI, Wonderstuff, local bands (I lived 6 miles from Stourbridge and the Stourbridge scene was massive).

Through the next few years I was in university; no money for gear, but lots of tapes being swapped with friends, lots of time spent going to gigs (I was in London, so I was out probably once a week seeing bands). I spent a lot of my time helping out with a great band called The Muscle Shoal, who definitely should have been big.

I seem to remember I had the Sony tape deck through most of this time. Augmented with a JVC tape deck of the 'no door' open-loading design at one point. My VCR was a Phillips V2000 at this point so retro was definitely cool.

I was unemployed for around a year after university and then in temporary / low paid work for the year or two after that so it was only in my mid-twenties that I had the wherewithall to improve my system. I bought my first CDP around this time off an old school friend. A Technics SL-PG520A which I still have. It was a basic machine, but had lots of stuff I liked, like the jog-wheel and peak-search. I replaced the Sony and the Sanyo () with an Aiwa ADF-450 from Richer Sounds. Later this was augmented with a Sony TL-K515S deck (HX-PRO, Dolby S - nice!). By 1999 I'd also adopted Minidisc. In retrospect I wish I'd got into DAT at that stage, but at the time it was out of my price range. I made do with a Sony MDS-JE500 standalone machine and a Sony MZ-R50 portable. Around 2001 I did make the move to DAT, with a Tascam DA-20 MKII which I still have, and around 2003 I got myself a Tascam recordable CDP, a CDR-3000 if I remember correctly. That died after a year - very disappointing.

I also 'upgraded' my amp... I say 'upgraded' because all I was doing was swapping a well-made DIY amp for a mid-range pre-built one. A Harman/Kardon HK1400. The Harmon/Kardon sounds nice I think. My current Quad sounds more natural while the HK was perhaps a bit more obvious, but it was a nice amp which lasted a long time. I've got it saved for a second system some time! The speakers were still the same KEF-based ones I'd had since I was 16.

In my late 20's I bought and passed on a load of gear. Home cinema stuff that just took up room with loads of speakers, to no real benefit, alongside my existing 2-channel set up. I bought my first turntable - a ProJect Debut (Mk I) turntable which was always disappointing TBH. Rumble and surface noise were terrible with it! It really put me off vinyl for a long time.

For a few years though I was spending around £50 a week at the local record store. By this time I'd moved to Bristol and was a regular at Imperial Music on Park Street. They were an amazing shop, very friendly, great selection of new and old releases, imports, vinyl and CD. I got into Ninja Tune, City Centre Offices, Morr Music, VVM Test, Leaf, Skintone, Major Force and all manner of obscure electronica, avant-garde and 'ill-shit' that they were apt to recommend with their little yellow post-it notes attached to the new releases.

For a couple of years I maybe single-handedly kept them afloat. In the end their rent doubled and they folded. And with it another chapter of Bristol's independent record shop history, as Replay would follow about a year later.

Alongide this passion for modern electronica, I was utilising the 'net and CD101.com to build my Canterbury and Byrds collections. That's maybe another chapter of my story, cos for the timebeing I think this installment has gone on long enough! I'll save the rest for later

[Joe]

By this time I'd moved to Bristol and was a regular at Imperial Music on Park Street.

Ah, Imperial. Quite possibly the funniest thing I've ever seen was an elderly couple who'd wandered into Imperial asking the pierced/tattooed/dreadlocked youth behind the counter if he had any Mozart in stock. He very kindly directed them to the (now also defunct) Bristol Classical Music shop down in the Centre.

[Beechwoods]

Replay by the bus station was also great - the later one on Park Street wasn't a patch on it. And I miss the Music Gear Exchange in Bath. They always had really interesting kit there, reel to reels and the like though it never looked like any of their stock shifted. Maybe that was the problem!

[The Grand Wazoo]

This thread is great!!!!

Here's my contribution...........

My first exposure to recorded music came with one of these:


A Bush ‘Monarch’ – 4 speed autochanger with built-in speaker.

My parents took music seriously, & we lived overseas quite a bit, in places where you had to make your own entertainment, so there was always music around the house. Their taste was almost exclusively classical but with a little Brubeck, Modern Jazz Quartet & Errol Garner thrown in for good measure.

Later, my old man got a Sony reel to reel, then a Garrard SP25, Marantz AU 505 & some Wharfedale speakers were bought back in the UK to keep us entertained during an imminent 2 year spell in Central Africa. As the only family with a hi-fi in a close knit community of British, German & Yugoslavian expats , we used to hold musical appreciation evenings, oiled by G&T's, imported Scotch & local Lion Lager. Then, one Christmas back in UK, I & my sisters got a Van der Molen TT with built-in amp & some no-name speakers. That was when I started buying records for myself in anger. My first single was Black Night by Deep Purple. The first album I knew all the lyrics to was Ziggy Stardust.

I bought & devoured albums by Dylan, Yes, Genesis, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin – all that stuff. Later, I hated most of what was released in the 80’s. I learnt to recognise and admire the art of the great 3 minute pop single, but bought hardly any of them! By the time I was 15 or 16, all my money went on albums – I used to hitch-hike the 12 miles to Brighton & trail around the 2nd hand record shops (of which there were a lot!), buying everything of interest that I could afford.

When I got into hi-fi properly for myself, my musical taste exploded & I found myself buying all sorts of stuff that I had previously not known existed or had discounted as ‘not for me’.

My first separates were the ubiquitous SP25, Sharp cassette deck, a Sony amp (which I still own) & Wharfedale Lintons (?). Later, came some AR speakers (shop soiled from Lasky’s in Brighton). When I started working as a pre-college industrial student for the Forestry Commission, I went on a 3 week training course & spent my subsistence money (£33 a day on top of normal wages) on an AR TT with Linn LVX/Basik, Cyrus 2 & B&W DM101’s. I was earning a lot of money for a 19 year old & living in the middle of nowhere in Devon, with nowhere to spend it, so once a month, on weekends home, I’d get back round the vinyl emporia & also the new record shops & set-to, expanding my collection. By this time, I was getting into Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Cannonball Adderley, BB King, The Grateful Dead and more. The Zappa collection was already about 30 albums strong!!

That all seems like a lifetime ago…………..

[Alex_UK]

Well, I hope you will indulge me the pleasure of my reminiscing – actually, you haven't got any choice if I post it, only if you want to read it! So here goes...

Well, I must have been around 11, so therefore it would have been about 1980, and my best friend Mark's uncle had recently moved into a new house and was busy doing the DIY as you do. He needed to break up the concrete drive (for some reason) and Mark and I were doing our Bob-A-Job for the Scouts, and were duly put to work with lump hammers and cold-chisels on the “chain gang” to break up the drive! I remember “Uncle Tim” from when he had stayed with Mark's family a few years before, and his amazing hi-fi boxes all piled up in the front room he was staying in. Well, his new home was no different, and after we had finished our sentence of hard labour and filled in our little book, Uncle Tim demonstrated his hi-fi. My Mum and Dad had a Ferguson “sound system” - and I remember giggling at “Donovan's Intergalactic Laxative” and humming along to “A Night At The Opera”, but music had never sounded like THIS! I have no idea what the system was, but I loved it!

I started to get into music, my first album being “Anthem” by “Toyah”, and I was soon hankering after a midi system from Rumbelows. I guess I was about 15 by the time I has saved up enough to buy my Sharp system, and although I loved it, it never sounded that great, despite the 2 extra sets of speakers I bought from jumble sales and wired in! My best friend Mark was obsessed with Blondie – well, probably more with Debbie Harry, but what's a teenage boy to think?! Sadly, on the weekend of his 18th Birthday party, Mark was killed in a motorcycle crash, and as you can imagine, for a 17 year old who had been like his brother for 10 years I was devastated. A while later, Mark's Mum and Dad asked if I would like the old hi-fi that Mark had, which had been passed down from Uncle Tim. Of course, I was very pleased to have it. The years passed, and the old hi-fi gradually expired bit by bit – first the Rogers tuner, then the Akai Cassette deck, and eventually the Rogers (solid state – don't panic!) amplifier. A trip or two to the repair shops ensued, but eventually the days came when they had completely given up the ghost. The only thing I had left was the Turntable. As my income increased, so I started to acquire my own separates system, but the turntable always seemed to soldier on. I always knew it was a pretty good turntable, but it was very bulky, and domestic bliss ensured that it was eventually retired to the loft and replaced by a non-descript Technics player.

Well “domestic bliss” was never destined to happen with wife number 1, and about 10 years ago I found myself a bachelor again, and with all my goods and chattels in tow I rediscovered the big old beast – I did a bit of research, and apparently a Garrard 401 with an SME 3009 (Improved) tonearm and a Shure V15 cartridge is quite a respectable bit of kit! Part of the reason for joining this forum is my desire to sympathetically resurrect the Garrard, and build a fitting tribute to my best mate, his Dad Hugh and Uncle Tim – all of whom sadly gone, but had a huge influence on my life, and my love of music reproduction.

Sorry this has dragged on, but you did ask, and as it's Friday night, a rather nice Tempranillo has helped oil the wheels!

[MartinT]

My first real taste of hi-fi started with a Linsley-Hood 75W amplifier kit from Powertran (the circuit can still be referenced in Wireless World but the company is, sadly, long gone), together with Cambridge R40 speakers, a Connoisseur BD1 turntable and SME3009-II pickup arm. The SME experienced a variety of cartridges from Goldring, Shure, Ortofon, Empire and Dynavector, the latter being my very first moving coil type.

Of course, there were many pre-hi-fi configurations, including some madness with redesigning the amps inside a Dansette music centre (yes, the records really did stack and drop), experiments with a JVC 8-track receiver (da-di-da, k-lunk, di-da), Wharfedale Chevins with the single 8" dual-concentric driver and some truly awful amp modules by a company best forgotten (actually, I have).

Back to the Linsley-Hood. This design was one of the first to use a quasi push-pull topology using all-NPN output transistors - type Sescosem BDY56 (what a memory for trivia). When I stripped out the excessive tone controls and filters from the preamp section I arrived at an amplifier that was really very good indeed, although it did run rather hot due to insufficient heatsinking.

The Cambridge speakers I built from completed cabinets acquired cheap (they had just gone bust) and a set of KEF drive units (B139 bass, B110 mid and T27 tweeters - I'm good at this). They were small transmission line designs, complete with lamb's wool filling, and gave me a taste for wide bandwidth at an early age. They were tonally neutral and gave me excellent service for a number of years.

The Connoisseur was a fun turntable with an undersized platter and a switch-on lever that gave the platter a spin to ensure it rotated in the right direction. The SME, in contrast, was a jewel of design and engineering. I remember that the damped cueing mechanism failed after a couple of years and SME not only replaced the mechanism but also brought the entire arm up to latest revision for the princely charge of £1. That's service that sticks in the mind for a long time.

Cartridges gave me a lot of trouble. The Goldrings were dull, the Shures uncouth. The best match for the SME was the Empire (2000E/III if I remember correctly), but potentially the best sound was the Ultimo/Dynavector except for its lightweight bass and midrange dominant sound. Little did I know then how much the arm choice could improve the Dynavector's sound.

A little later, I decided the Linsley-Hood had to go, in favour of something a little more powerful. I started reading up on the (then) new Hitachi power MOSFETs and their circuit notes. I bought a lot of components, and two big cases to house them in, to create a passive preamp and butch power amp. I remember using two 625VA toroidal transformers for the power amp, plus a whole row of reservoir capacitors. Huge overkill, all wasted because the basic circuit was dynamically compressed and flat sounding with little detail. I lived with this disappointing behemoth for too long, constantly tweaking it to try to get better results. It was time to move on...

Sometime later, I was persuaded to take valve (tube) equipment seriously after a friend bought a pair of very rare and expensive Dynavector valve monoblocks. They sounded stunning, with clarity and immense dynamic drive. I was smitten.

When a Croft SIP preamp and Series 4S power amp became available ex-dem from Audio T in West Hampstead, I bit and bought them both. Sometime later, I bought a Mitsubishi direct drive mechanism and made a new turntable out of it, which was more reliable than the Connoisseur, but no better sounding.

An interlude with the launch of CD saw first a Philips CD-104 and then a CD-650 in short order. They were interesting, but gave little clue as to how much information is locked in a CD. More of that much later in this story.

Then I decided that I had to acquire a 'real' turntable, so bought a Michell Syncro with Helius Aureus pickup arm. The turntable was a beauty, the arm a good visual match but, unfortunately, not well built. It had problems with binding bearings and I had to keep re-setting them to stop the arm from, well, stopping half way across a record. The Ortofon MC-10 sounded very fine, though, despite it being my second one. The first cartridge never lived to play anything as I swiped the cantilever while attaching it to the arm. Exit one cartridge, stage left.

Also at around this time, I decided to retire the Cambridge speakers in favour of a pair of JBL L-100T which were large reflex designs with the classic JBL 12" paper cone woofer and titanium tweeter. The smaller L-20T were popular at the time, but the L-100T was virtually unknown in the UK. The Croft drove them well and they made a very respectable sound with the ability to go low and loud without break-up.

A little later, I invested in my first true high end component: a Roksan Xerxes turntable with SME IV pickup arm and Audio Technica AT-OC7 cartridge. Phono preamp duties were courtesy of an EAR834P De-Luxe.

Soon after that, I went down to Covent Garden Records having decided that I had to replace previous CD players with something of the calibre of the Roksan. After listening to Denon and Marantz models from the top of their range, I ended up with a beautiful Pioneer PD-91 Reference Series, a battleship of a CD player.

Some time earlier, I had bought a speaker kit from IPL Acoustics (S5TL), a UK kit vendor. I sent the cabinet drawings to my father in the hope that he would build me some fine cabinets for me to complete with wiring and drivers. He certainly came up with beautiful cabinets, but about five years later. He had been a little busy. Nevertheless, they looked wonderful in Brazilian Rosewood and I completed them in just a few days. They sounded very good, smoother than the JBLs with more insight and extended but not such powerful bass despite being transmission line designs.

I also distracted myself by acquiring a Leak Stereo 20 and completely rebuilding it with modern components. I also changed the biasing of the phase splitter stage and replaced the input stage with the more linear ECC82 valve. It also has soft recovery solid state rectifiers and large polypropylene reservoir capacitors to replace the original electrolytics. What an extraordinary amplifier. I learned all I know about soundstage depth and width, microdynamics and the throwing forward of voice in the mix. It doesn't have much power but drives speakers very well and sounds like a much more expensive amp. For a while, I even bi-amped my system with the Croft driving the bass and the Leak driving the mid/treble.

On the CD front, I went for the Assemblage DAC-3 and, later, the D2D-1 upsampler, both fine pieces of digital equipment. Together with an Audio Research CDT-1 bought used from Heatherdale Audio, my CD replay performance was significantly raised - but not into the realms of extreme high end I had heard elsewhere. For that, I had to wait for the Sony SCD-1.

Another house move and a divorce later, I ended up with what I have now, a far cry from my hi-fi beginnings. It's been a great trip.