I am going to be somewhat liberal when choosing my first truly "Audiophile" experience. In college I had a friend that had a pair of Definitive Technology BP2000 speakers that were by far the best speaker that I had every heard, but his style was mostly just blasting music which didn't appeal to me or demonstrate their true SQ.
My first true "audiophile" experience was visiting a local HiFi shop that appeared to be an almost tacky car audio place from the outside, but I had been told to ask about the basement. The only thing that I remember was some Vienna Acoustics speakers that blew my mind.
When I was ready to dip a toe into the audiophile pool several years later, I went back to the shop and it had shifted it's focus to be exclusively home audio with Focal being their brand of choice. Their main room gave me opportunity to audition Focal speakers from the $750 bookshelf to the $180,000 Grande Utopia's. What was cool looking back was that I was able to hear the most affordable speakers at their best because they were being powered by the huge Krell mono blocks that were there for the Grande Utopia speakers. My favorite setup was Diablo Utopia speakers with a JL Audio Gotham subwoofer. The sound that came out of a large bookshelf was mind bending to me. As it turns out, Krell has continued to be a consistent amplifier that pulls me in whenever I'm around a system with them in it. I also have continued to love the Focal sound and have never once thought about needing to upgrade mine even though I've heard objectively better speakers and know that there's a lot out there that are superior.
The thing that I look back on and laugh about from my auditioning and buying process was the pain that I must have put the salesman through listening to one of my Josh Groban CDs that I later discovered is a painfully poor recording. Ironically, there was one song in particular that was used to make the final decision for which model to get.
I don't know how much my tastes are a result of being blown away with Focal speakers and Krell amplifiers being my first significant experience in the audiophile world or if I happened to be very fortunate by it also aligning to my taste.
- robot
