I got into HT totally by accident. We didn't watch much TV when I was a kid so I came up the "audio" side... made my first speaker about 13 -- a single 2 way Philips with 5" woofer/mid and 1" tweeter. Only made one speaker because (a) it cost half as much and (b) my sound source was a beautiful furniture grade wooden "hi fi", the centerpiece of our living room, with a vacuum tube amplifier, two "full range" speakers, AM tuner and a turntable that could play those newfangled LPs. Frequency response of the hi fi speakers was what you would expect from two 12" speakers with light cones.
So... crawl inside with the diagonal cutters, cut out the wires for the 12" speakers, and wire in my little acoustic suspension speaker. Even my parents were surprised. Not only could we hear some totally new sounds (high notes
), but the bass was actually better than the big hi fi speakers even with a single 5" woofer and a good cabinet.
OK, I was hooked. Next set of speakers were 3 ways with 10" woofer, same tweeter, and the Philips "midrange in a can" with its own sealed enclosure. Pretty nice, although in hindsight they had the same bass peak I would come to complain about with Paradigm Atoms many years later.
Didn't have much money myself but had friends with too much money so was able to pick up some nice used equipment at great prices. First electronics purchase was an Advent receiver, cast off by someone who wanted lots of power and big boomy bass. I loved it -- maybe 15 watts per channel but very clean and I liked the styling. Next was some kind of high end turntable (way out of my price range) whose brand I have not been able to remember with whatever the second from the top of the line Shure cartridge was. Final addition was a Southwest Technical Products power amplifier kit -- I did something wrong during the assembly so occasionally the power supply would short across some resistors used to tie the case to ground (no idea why they used resistors)... smoke and flame would come out of the amp while playing from time to time but you had to watch for it because it still sounded great. Turned out that there were supposed to be some insulating bushings on the output jacks and I was missing a few.
University brought (among other things) moving away from home and discovery of more speaker brands, notably KEF, and discovery of transmission line cabinets. Five of us rented a house downtown, with a sound room holding a LOT of equipment, probably 3500 LPs, and a cast-in concrete pillar going down to the basement which held the turntable stable even when 80 drunken people were dancing up and down on the floor. Don't think the landlord liked the pillar...
Fast forward through 20 years of domestic bliss but crappy sound systems. Had a DVD player but never used it. Picked up a set of M2s and a sub (hey, I didn't want to spend a lot of money on the internet so didn't get M60s) to start putting together a nice audio system again. Hooked the DVD player and TV up to the receiver and was astounded how good the sound was with modern DVDs. All my friends have nice TVs and crappy sound systems so I never knew...
Anyways, the rest is history. M60s, VP100, QS8s, HK 630, new DVD player... you know how it goes.
