I started out in 1956 at age 17 with a Webcor Portable record player, graduated to a console with a radio and turntable under the lid. Finally, in 1978 my transformative product was a Pioneer SX-1050! Which I still own though it is rarely called into duty. I couldn’t afford speakers after buying the Pioneer so I joined a group at HP that had a blueprint of the Bose 901 speakers, accurate down to the sources for every part. We commandeered the Fab Shop to cut the speakers to the proper size and drill the stepped circles to fit the nine speakers. What a mess we made. The next weekend we put the speakers together and wired them along with the equalizer for each pair of speakers. I was the only female and I had a blast!
My second transformative product was importing the Quad ESL-63 Electrostatic speakers from a store in London. I replaced the SX-1050 with an Audiomat Arpege tube integrated amp and I was in audiophile heaven.
i still own Quad ESL-63 speakers, the US Monitor version, and I like to joke that I’ll be buried with them. And yes, I still like them that much. I’m into classical music and opera and they are a perfect fit for the music I enjoy listening to.
My current amp and preamp are Luxman, the Cl-38uC and the MQ-88uC. My other sources are a Berkeley Audio DAC Reference Series 2+, Roon Nucleus, Audio Alchemy DMP-1 Media Server, Ayre DX-5 DSD SACD Player and a fully restored B&O Beogram 4004 turntable. Oh, and a Nakamichi DR-1 tape cassette player. I’ve been an audiophile most of my life and at age 86 this system is probably it.