Your First System

In the late 70's I had a beautiful new Schwinn Varsity ten speed bike that held my first REAL audio system.

I was 12 or so and it was an AudioVox cassette player that had a built in amplifier and volume control. I attached it to the back bike rack powered by a motorcycle battery that was in a bike seat bag hanging from the back of the seat. I had 5 1/4 inch speakers attached to mirrors that rose a few inches off the bars that I super glued the magnets to. This was my first system and it sounded awesome! Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan... I was in heaven. Two of my favorite things together, so cool.

I built my first system when I was 15; I'm 72 now. My first amp was a Heathkit that took me a week to build. My first enclosure was a thick cardboard box with a coax speaker because I couldn't wait to hear my amp. The source was a cheap turntable. As an improvement to my speaker I found plans in a Popular Electronics magazine for a "sweet sixteen" enclosure with 16 RadioShack 4" drivers which were modified to increase their excursion. I added a 12" speaker in the attic access hatch turning the attic into an "infinite baffle". The last improvement was the addition was a piezoelectric driver as a tweeter. I'm sure it would sound terrible today but I thought it was the best system I'd ever heard at the time.

Given to me by my parents as a high school graduation present in 1975: BIC turntable with Shure V15III cartridge, Pioneer SX-838 receiver, pair of Sylvania AS 125B speakers. Still use receiver and speakers as a garage system!

At my very early age I had phonograph with spring and one day I couldn't dial the spring and was listening to my records by simply spinning at near correct speed with my finger. Than I tried to fix it by taking it apart by putting together collapsed spring back into coils kneat, but it jumped out of chassis high up the ceiling. I was probably 5...6 and was VERY upset to tears that I wouldn't ever be able to spin my records manually. My dad than managed to get old WW2 times Telefunken console unit. After some small research he managed to get all tubes in place and start it up and it worked! Few to several years later I was able to troubleshoot it myself and replace tubes as necessary as this console I was using till my youth. The console had tuner, record player and 7" r2r tape player. By that time I learned circuits and kinematics of all 3 console components and knew how to fix issues.

I remember it very well, though it was way back in '69. A Garrard SL55 turntable with a Shure M91e cartridge, plugged into a Fisher X-100A integrated amp (tubed, of course), powering a pair of Acoustic Research 4ax's. I could actually still enjoy music through that system today!