As A Youngster, What Unit Puqued Your Interest In All This?

My very first real job ~1977 while still in high school was as a part time salesman at the local Lafayette Radio. I was a kid in a candy store! Was running a $200 Sanyo Integrated system at home for several years prior. Soon I had all Lafayette/Criterion separates: integrated amp, tuner, phono, speakers with HEIL Air Motion Transformer.

Nearby shops sold Magneplanar, McIntosh, Klipsch and other goodies I saw and heard for the first time. 

Then on to college where I landed a similar gig at the local Tech Hifi and away we go....

My dad's mono system:  Rek-O-Cut turntable, Audax tonearm, GE pickup into a Bogen integrated tube amp into an early KLH 6.  I inherited the KLH 6.  It still works.  He once told me he auditioned early stereo and thought it was a gimmick created to sellore speakers!  Whenever my folks weren't home, I would put on some Led Zeppelin and crank it.

First heard hi-fi music at a basketball team celebration party at the home of our team sponsor in the mid-60's. He had a Fisher receiver and I don't remember the speakers. After hearing that clarity, I was off to the local hi-fi store in La Jolla, CA, and scraped enough together to buy a Fisher receiver. I couldn't afford speakers after that so I built some massive speakers out of 3/4" plywood and some 12" speakers (no tweeters or crossovers as I didn't know about that stuff). Still sounded awesome until 1975 in San Francisco I bought a pair of KEF speakers after hearing Fleetwood Mac's Rihannon in stereo. Been hooked ever since.

I was in preschool and there was an all in one portable record player there. I was facinated by it and what it could do. I had to have it. I went home with it. There was much conversation afterwards that i cant remember. My grandfather, a successfull architect, with many cool things in the eyes of a youngster, gave me my own with a 45 of, eight days a week. This was in holland in the mid seventies. 

It was My buddy's system:

Hitachi receiver

Unknown turntable

Pioneer Cassette Deck with fluoroscan meters

Realistic Mach One speakers

...followed within a few years (early '80s) with my own:

Luxman L450 Integrated

Luxman Graphic EQ

Nakamichi LX-5 3-head cassette deck

Pioneer PL-200 (?) direct drive turntable with Pickering XV-15 cartridge

Realistic Mach One speakers.

...oh yeah, there was also that first time I heard Rush in my other buddy's car on a Craig stereo of some sort--Cygnus X-1 and............I was hooked.