In high school, had a 3 piece Aiwa system with cd player, a sony double deck cassete/raido player, and a tiny aiwa cassete deck. The first speakers i bought with my money was a M-audio computer speakers when i first came to the US. While going back I took them me and also got a onkyo HTIB.
The next time i came, i had some cheapo laptop speakers - i think they came with the laptop from work, but then i found PE Teck-talk within a couple of months and got the OS kit and the tiny bare 15W dayton amp with the volume control which pretty popular back then. That year i attended my first DIY gathering in Grinnel Iowa, back in 2011. Now I do not have any commercial speakers in the house.
My first stereo was a cheap silver face receiver and a set of monkey coffins that all I remember about them were they had a 10” passive radiator. I then was gifted some Sansui speakers with 12” woofers. I blew up the amp trying to run all 4 speakers at the same time. I then picked up a Yamaha RX-V490 receiver and continued to run all 4 of the monkey coffins lined up on my wall. My neighbor had a car audio box with 2 12” MTX terminator woofers and 2 horn tweeters in a single box. I ran them in the mix for a bit. Then I ended up blowing all of the monkey coffin speakers and decided to build my first set of speakers. I used the 2 MTX 12” woofers, the 2 piezo horn tweeters, and added 2 more piezo tweeters, 4 5.25” closed back Legacy midranges and 2 more Rockford Fosgate 12” woofers into 2 giant monstrosity towers. I used off the shelf 3way crossovers. I was about 16 at the time. I also added a matching cd player and tape deck to the Yamaha stack. You can also see the boom box I had at the bottom of the pic. This system followed me to college. About midway through college, I used the 2 12" MTX woofers, 2 of the midranges, and 2 Peerless tweeters and built a smaller set of speakers again with an off the shelf 3way crossover.
I started with a very cheap console stereo (AM/FM stereo, bad turntable, bad speakers) I picked up at a garage sale. The turntable didn’t really work well enough to be useful. I bought a real cassette deck so I could record albums and songs off the radio.
It quickly became apparent that I needed real speakers and a receiver to replace the console. I saved up and wound up with a flouroscan Pioneer receiver and a pair of house brand (Acoustalinear if I recall correctly) speakers from a stereo shop called “the Sound of Music”, which later grew into Best Buy.
Some very impressive gear and journeys in this thread, thanks to all!
I would think this is the same for everyone, but I remember being knocked out by what I could hear on a ‘proper’ system and realised what I’d been missing out on. Then, about ten years ago, I built Curt’s “Slapshots” and they knocked me out with detail, low end and sheer quality I hadn’t heard before.
Before I realy bothered pursuing stereo on my own; my father had some sony all in one powered towers that tickled my ears in a good way every once in a while. (Sony SA-VA100) That, along with decent PC speakers and even regular junky headphones taught me that there is more depth in recordings than the average person gets to experience. For years I could not push myself over the edge to DIY stuff, and I couldn’t afford much either. So I ended up starting out with the extremely modest setup I mentioned above. Then picked up a Pioneer AV reciever and a Dayton 8" subwoofer. The Insignia bookshelves kinda sucked (sound wise) so I think that finally pushed me into trying DIY… Since I could buy parts slowly over time as they went on sale.
I dug those Insignias out of storage to use momentarily while I brought my recent projects to gatherings. I guess they sound so bad (compared to my builds?) that my wife thought she hit a wrong button on the remote and got it playing through the TV speakers. I decided to give em away after that.
So I have had very little personal experience with commercial home/stereo speakers. I couldn’t afford it. I just knew good sound when I heard it. Some of the lowest distortion sound I experienced was from good pro rigs. So that is probably what got me interested in horns. For some reason I still find direct radiator stuff slightly boring. I guess that is one reason I’ve been dragging my feet recently. Gotta get back into horns.
Wasn’t mine but my first couple of intros: a high school buddy of mine had a real-to-real, nothing fancy, tied into a radio shack amp and a set of large 2way speakers. Coolest thing I had seen / heard at that point.
Then a few years later another friend ‘showed me’ his dad’s McIntosh system- couldn’t hear it as he wasn’t allowed to actually play it…. and I was hooked with knobs and dials from that point forward.
My first real system was thanks to school friend who’s girlfriend’s brother was selling his maggies and son of ampzilla, as he wanted to put a V8 into his TR6 and needed to raise some cash. Got the maggies at a steal, we couldn’t come to an agreement for the amp (sorry till this day). So I took out a student loan and bingo.
Way back in college I had no money, and usually a cheapa$$ little pioneer amp with $80 / pair Japanese speakers. Really envied my friends with nice Yamaha amps and better speakers. Studied Acoustics and music production at IU, where the recording studio had a nice pair of tannoy floorstanding spekers (but the room was a bard concrete rectangle with NO treatments) - Got married a bit later and my wife had a nice big Sony receiver (60w/ch) That sounded really very good, paired with these vintage Fisher speakers. They always sounded really very good to me (replaced the blown tweeter with a Morel and tuned 1st order cap and resistor by ear). Later got into DIY and ran a FR and found that they were really pretty flat. Never heard any strange lobing from the 2 midranges. Around 2000 I started to build my own speakers!
When I went to college in the late 60’s one of my dorm mates worked in a hi-fi shop and brought home something new just about every week to get familiar with. I spent a lot of time in his room listening. My first Hi-Fi buy was a small Kenwood receiver in the early 70’s and a pair of small bookshelf speakers (Maybe KLH). The receiver was probably something like this.
In a few years I moved up to the original Heil AMT 1’s. The dealer let you trade up within a year with credit for the price paid so I traded to a early 2 panel pair of Magnepan’s. I had a B&O Beogram 3000 turntable, kit built Dynaco tube preamp and stereo 70 amplifier. A lot of gear has come and gone in the last 55 years.
The Magnepan’s. That’s my older brother and his daughter.
Magnepans were quite popular here in the mid/late 70s, but i’d never heard them, they were way out of my budget: a basic GM Holden car cost around $4,000, the Magnepans were ‘from’ about $2000.
They sounded good. They’re planar magnetics with lots of moving area. They had a large soundstage and were really clean. The bass was natural but being dipoles they didn’t go low. It didn’t take me long to add subwoofers.
I scored a pair of Magnepan IIs about 6 years ago. The only speaker I ever heard (much less owned) that gave a “you are here” soundstage (IE: you were in the room for the recording). But the “sweet spot” was very small.
I should mention that while I was finding my way, next door on the farm my Grandpa was rocking MacIntosh in his basement wood shop. Yes, it got full of sawdust. Upstairs was a huge console unit. Heathkit comes to mind as powering the components, reel-to-reel and turntable included. I don’t recall the speakers being commercial in either setup.
Back in the late 1960’s to early 1970’s , my first “proper” stereo system consisted of a pair of 8 inch Radio Shack coaxials mounted in the small Radio Shack cardboard boxes that they were sold in. Back then, I didn’t have the ability to build a real enclosure, so maybe this does not quality as a “proper” stereo system. In any event, I don’t recall the Radio Shack model number, but the drivers had approx 2" diameter paper cone tweeters (not domes) mounted to the woofer’s pole piece. A single NPE cap rolled off the bass going to the tweeter.
Source material at the time was a Philco reel-to-reel tape recorder playing back pre-recorded 7" reel-to-reel tapes. The tape recorder had built in stereo 4x6" wing speakers, but also had 1/4 jacks for connecting external speakers. Pre-recorded tapes were 3-3/4 ips speed types, but the recorder could also record and playback at 7-1/2 ips. As kids, we were facinated by reel-to-reel tape recorders and felt that they were capable of superior sound quality as compared to records or am/fm radio broadcasts. But, at this time, we had not heard or compared the sound to a good quality turntable/cartridge setup.
I decided to give em away after that.
Halloween party picture.