....but not exactly. Anyway, I spent a lot of hours listening to it and learned to love not only the music, but the equipment as well, especially after I got old enough for dad to let me operate it! By the time I reached junior high/high school age, that old tube system had died the death of "no longer available" tubes and we had moved on to the 70's world of Japanese components.
At that point, I was working in my mom's restaurant part time and started buying my own components with my own money. Of course, I was around a bunch of geek Chinese grad students (as well as my own super-geek college-aged brother), so my taste ran a little more sophisticated than my classmates at school. The first piece I bought was a Radio Shack (Kenwood contracted) receiver that was not only a very cool black (rare in those days when only professional gear came in black), but had a remote control! It looked something like this:
Of course, over time, equipment has come and gone. This was especially true of my late 20's and 30's when I was working professionally, but not yet married much less with children! It was such a part of my life and I so regularly "hung out" at a local stereo store that one of the salemen was in my wedding and is still one of my best friends! Eventually, I'd even have a part time job there while I was working IT at Texas Tech.
During that time, I learned the principals behind buying and selling technology without "loosing your shirt" since although I was young, single and working.....I was a teacher and didn't have the disposable income of a lawyer or doctor. Even handicapped, I learn when and where to buy well enough to get myself into nice separates, esoteric components as well as what sounds good, what doesn't, how components work together to make good sound and that it often didn't have a lot to do with amount of money spent or brand! I also learned when to get out of technologies before the price dropped so much that my stuff became worthless. A good example was my collection Laserdiscs that I sold for around $5 each before we left Chicago. Within a year after that, they were worth less than half that!
With all the "horse trading" over those years, I did luck out in that I never sold off my (and my dad's) collection of vinyl records. In fact, with modern equipment, those old records never sounded better. Plus there is a great relaxation as well with all the rituals associate with their use.
Currently, my vintage Dual 510 belt-drive turntable equipped with a Grado "Gold" cartridge is the center-piece of the serious sources in my system.
In fact, I'm sitting here listening to it "as we speak", so to speak. It along with an Integra CD Changer, Yamaha Minidisc deck, Griffin iPod dock, Sony Blu-ray player, and self-built A/V PC, comprise the bulk of my system. The iPod gets the majority of use since it holds our entire library of music, the Minidisc is for when I'm feeling like a rebel and want to be completely different than anyone else and of course the other pieces are obvious. But when I'm serious about relaxing, its the turntable plays "pure stereo" only through the Integra DTR6.3 reciever, KEF IQ7 speakers and B&W ASW675 sub.
Those are the biggies as far as amazing sound production for the money is concerned. I'll get into the tedious details of their acquisition some other time, but surfice to say that none of it was bought at anywhere near retail. There are other parts of course; such as the Blu-ray that handles the video end of the theater experience, and the HUGE Sony 200 Disc DVD changer that holds all the kids' movies so they don't have to handle them. One of the nice things about this is that the remote that came with that changer also controls the TV as well, so that's their remotes so they only need to learn and deal with it.
Our course these days, there's the inevitable game system (Wii for us), but a more interesting part of this system that will be subject to future posts is the "2nd Zone" built into the receiver so that it can distribute sound and sources to a remote zone. I've been accumulating parts for this over the years and it's about ready to be put together as we.
Right now, I'm just sitting here with the computer in my lap blogging about relaxation on a nice Easter Sunday afternoon with an old Fleetwood Mac Rumours record spinning on the turntable.
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