What made you love the SOUND of music, good Hifi.

[Clamjouster]

For me the best I'd ever heard as a teenager in the 90s was probably one of those JVC Adagio midi systems with the motorised speakers. Strangely I now use one of them at work thanks to eBay and winning an auction at 99p. My mums friend also had a Marantz system which sounded like sonic gold compared to my terrible Goldstar stereo.

I spent a lot of time in my local audio shop checking out the mainly high end Technics gear but I could never get a demo as it was obvious I was too young to afford it. Also I loved looking through the Littlewoods catalogue at the £1000+ stack systems, they just had to sound great in my mind.

I've now got three 2 channel systems worthy of note in my house and I made a point of one of them consisting of the gear I coveted so badly back in the day. So it consists of a Technics CD player (model no has escaped me) a Technics SH-GE70 EQ a Technics SU-A900 integrated amp which was up there amongst the very best they ever made, Cambridge Audio AUD 500 interconnects all round, Cambridge Audio Ultra Bi wire cable and a pair of early (probably 1992) Mission 751 standmount speakers which rest on a pair of mass loaded Mission M33i floorstanders which make excellent stands but are themselves used in a separate (and lesser) 5.1 system.

Even compared to some of my newer and more expensive stuff in other systems this set up is everything I ever imagined it would be as a dreaming teenager, the detail and soundstage is on another level to anything I'd heard when I was younger. Not only has music never sounded so good but as a hobby being an audiophile on a budget is up there with the best there is.

[Funk]

The_Burg said:

Listening to Fleetwood Macs Rumours on a very excited uncles first hifi.

Still the first album I play on any new kit I but, from vinyl on a Garrard SP25 through to an LP12 on vinyl to the newest 24/96 version on vinyl.

Latest discovery is The Beatles on 24/96.
Shame most great recording are ancient. There is great new music, but all diabolically badly mastered.
So bad that the better the hifi the worse it sounds. Still that's progress......

For home use, I really wouldn't bother with 24/96, it creates more issues than it purports to solve. I assumed automatically that as it was 'more bits' and 'more frequency' it must be better but it's really not. Have a read of this if you have a few mins, very informative: https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

[WestyCarl]

Ready to be flamed but;

20yrs ago walked into a B&O shop with (new) wife just for a laugh. Salesman asked me if I'd like a listen and was sold instantly.
Bought it there and then (on the monthly), walked out of the shop thinking WTF have we done. However can't be all bad as we still have it

[Flip Martian]

I grew up listening to good quality sound - whatever we played (and my Dad had control of the hifi I guess, so it was mostly classical) always sounded huge. He had a Leak amplifier attached to big floor standing speakers from the late '60s - I think he said they were "Norvek" or something similar. Anyway, driven by the Leak, made everything sound good. He had a hell of a job to replace them with something "modern" when both speakers and Leak amp eventually bit the dust sometime in the early '80s.

I have B & W speakers linked to a Kenwood amp and an old Marantz CD player. And a Kenwood tape deck. All more than 15 years old and just about to be set back up in the house after being in my office for the last 3 years. I do need a new turntable though.

[anonymous-user]

As a teenager I used to spend the school lunch break round at my mates house, which was conveniently situated near the school gates. His parents both worked so we had the place to ourselves. My mate's dad had a decent, for the time, hifi. Lenco turntable, Quad amps and 2 massive Tannoy floorstanders. He was a big jazz fan so we would stick on one of his albums every lunchtime and sit around listening whilst munching our sandwiches. I'd have been 12 or 13 when this started. At the time I didn't realise how good it sounded because I had nothing to compare it with. It was only over the next couple of years, as we all got into music and started buying cheap record players, that the realisation slowly dawned on me, that system really did sound rather good.

By the time I was 14 or 15 and spending any cash that came along on vinyl, our lunch breaks consisted of seeing how loud the amps would go whilst listening to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath albums. If my mate's dad had ever found out what we were spinning on his deck he would have gone ballistic but luckily he never found out as far as I know.

Anyway, what came from all that was my abiding love of great music and great musicians, Coltrane, Davis, Monk, Brubeck, Hayes et al, and the sheer pleasure of hearing it on a decent system. My own modest setup, Rega based turntable, Rotel amps and TDL speakers gives me the same thrill now, still playing the same albums that have been with me for the last 50 years, together with all the other great albums that I've bought between then and now.

The art critic Brian Sewell once wrote 'great art should nourish the soul', it does indeed.

[Brian Trizers]

WestyCarl said:

Ready to be flamed but...

Where do you think you are? The Pimp My Saxo forum?
No, it's much more civilized here. And while there is a certain hifi orthodoxy - which tends to be driven by journos who need something to write about - you don't have to worry about that if what you have still gives you pleasure. If it sounds good, it is good. And if it's lasted 20 years, it must have been made properly too.

Hope you've finished paying for it, though.

[Flip Martian]

WestyCarl said:

Ready to be flamed but;

20yrs ago walked into a B&O shop with (new) wife just for a laugh. Salesman asked me if I'd like a listen and was sold instantly.
Bought it there and then (on the monthly), walked out of the shop thinking WTF have we done. However can't be all bad as we still have it

Lovely. B & O stuff was always so futuristic looking when I was a boy. Must have been built well if its still in use. My dad had a B & O turntable for a long time.

[Podie]

I recall spending a fair bit on a TEAC Reference 500 system and some B&W 601 S2 speakers.

I loved how Soundgarden's Superunknown sounded on that kit.

[WestyCarl]

Flip Martian said:

WestyCarl said:

Ready to be flamed but;

20yrs ago walked into a B&O shop with (new) wife just for a laugh. Salesman asked me if I'd like a listen and was sold instantly.
Bought it there and then (on the monthly), walked out of the shop thinking WTF have we done. However can't be all bad as we still have it

Lovely. B & O stuff was always so futuristic looking when I was a boy. Must have been built well if its still in use. My dad had a B & O turntable for a long time.

Yup, it was probably the design that made me buy it, the glass doors silently moving open when reaching towards it. The whole experience was so much better than my twin tape deck Amstrad

[Flip Martian]

WestyCarl said:

Yup, it was probably the design that made me buy it, the glass doors silently moving open when reaching towards it. The whole experience was so much better than my twin tape deck Amstrad

Agreed! I used to sell Amstrad "tower systems" in Woolworths as a saturday boy - very difficult to sell something you know is so exceedingly crap. I cringed every time I put on an LP to demo them...

[varsas]

My story is a bit different to most.

There was no one thing. Through luck I guess there were a few of us growing up who were into music and HiFi. I remember we'd count the days until the next What HiFi came out, and then read it obsessivly. For a while all our money went on either HiFi stuff or computers. Whenever anyone was after a new CD player or amp or whatever we'd all research all the options, pour over the reviews and go out and audition stuff. It was a great way of learning. Looking back we all made some mistakes (Jamo speakers...) but listening to a new set of speakers or whatever was a real event, and later on I got 'our' first AV reciever and we started watching films in Pro-logic...we'd cart all these speakers and amps and stuff round to our mates house...make a complete mess of the living room...

I now realise it was more the mates I was with then the technology or even the music, and it's something I try and remember now. I'd rather listen to my music on a midi system and watch films on a 32inch TV than using my home cinema setup or HiFi if it meant I was with friends.

[Hoover.]

Mine was a pair of pioneer head phones which cost 4x the cost of my Walkman in 1987/88 ........ totally transformed music, even though it was recorded on tape

[MrBarry123]

My parents' Bang & Olufsen television and loudspeaker (I think BeoLab 6000) system. Now 12 years old (37", non-HD television!) and the sound quality is truly fantastic - nothing I've heard has ever come close to the sound it produces.

The design is so fresh as well - looks better/equal to 99% of systems you can buy today.

Edited by MrBarry123 on Sunday 26th April 21:33

[JimPD]

Started at Uni in mid eighties with Sundown Revolver turntable, Nytech Amp and Kef Caprice II speakers. A schoolfriends Rega Planar 3 / Teac / Mission set up started me off.
Nowadays have an Arcam Solo Mini which looks a lot neater so it is 'allowed' in the living room.

[P700DEE]

First system to really impress me was back at the London Hi-Fi show in the early 80s which was Krell amps and Magnapan MGIII (?) speakers. Hi-Fi has always been a mates/group listening thing. First evaluation was a three way meet comparing JVC amp, turntable and RAM speakers with my Dual, Marantz amp and Mission 700 speakers with anothers Dual, NAD 3020 and Celestion speakers.
Result Dual, NAD, Missions
It was not until the 90s that I joined the New Ash Green Hi-Fi club and discovered all sorts of music I would never have thought of listening to and lots of different hi-fi

[Elderly]

In the 60s a small shop called Studio 99 opened up around the corner from where we lived;
in there you could sit and drink coffee and listen to music on the quality equipment they were selling,
I could afford ......... nothing .

In the 70s I bought hi-fi that looked good - B & O tuner amps and a Michell hydraulic reference turntable;
for those of you too young to remember, Google image that turntable.

In 1981 I moved on to Meridian, Linn, Nakamichi, most of which I still use.

I then became an early adopter of the CD player and I loved the fact that I no longer had to put up with
dandruff getting stuck in a record's groove and the ability to be able change tracks by remote control .
The sound of early CD players was not as nice as a good vinyl source, but at the time I didn't care.

[dobly]

Back in the mid '80s when I was a teenager my girlfriend of the day played something on her father's kit - no idea of brands, but the speakers were (almost) adult coffin size, and the amplifier was definitely much bigger than the standard 440mm width (thinking back it was probably more like 500mm+ - perhaps something along the lines of Pioneers SX-1010 or bigger) The turntable was nothing special, just something substantial and solid with a SME? tonearm.
Bass was full and could be felt as well as heard, but not overblown - definitely shifting the air at relatively modest volumes...
Wonder what happened to that kit, and her........