What started you on the path to being audionut?


I was 14 and visited by 26 year old neighbor. Went to his room. He fired up his Thorens table with some Chicago running through a Carver preamp/cube amp into Heresy horn speakers.
At the time this was leaps and bounds better versus anything else I heard. I was hooked from that moment.

He also played trumpet in a Chicago tribute band. I use to sit outside on my mom's front steps listening to his band practice as the music flowed out from the open, cellar hatchway doors.
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Showing 2 responses by jameswei

My parents went shopping for a console in the 1960s. (They settled on a Magnavox.) While shopping, they asked the salesman about some components on a shelf in the corner of the store, and they were told they were very expensive but sounded good. This piqued my curiosity.

In high school, I had to walk past an audio store. I went in and eventually bought a cheap Fisher 3 piece combo system (turntable mounted on top of the receiver) which I thought was much better than our Magnavox.

In college, a lot of guys had much better stuff in their rooms, and I learned a lot more about good sound. By the time I graduated, I had collected a decent system and the bug was in my blood.

My pride and joy were my Rectilinear 3 highboys. But years later when I read a column by Julian Hirsch about how modern speakers had surpassed them, I started upgrading again. Like I replaced the Rectilinear 3s with Thiel 3.6s and then with Wilson W/P 6s. etc etc.
Stereo5, I really liked the way the Rectilinears sounded too. In my mind, they had a sense of the sound of electrostatics, which were out of my price range. They were airy and the sound seemed to be emitted from the entire baffle, given their 4 tweeters. And the ported woofer went lower than most others.

Looking at Wikipedia, a list of key people at the company has notable designers: Arnold Schwartz, James Bongiorno, Marty Gersten, Jon Dahlquist, Richard Shahinian