how did you find "the gon"


in my case my local dealer turned me on to audiogon after searching endlessly for a peice for me with no luck,the very day he told me about this site i became a member & within 2 weeks bought my 1st peice of gear.

my question is how did you find it & how long after you joined was your first deal.

mike.
128x128bigjoe
I was playing a Beatles LP backwards and distinctly heard a voice say: "Go to DubU DubU DubU Dot Audio Gone Dot Com. I think it was Paul's.
Always the lagging electronics consumer, think it was XMAS 2001 that I trudged down to the best(and only ) mid-fi "boutique" to get the kids each a dvd player, and while there, somehow ended up getting momma and myself a Yamaha receiver, a dvd and ordered a pair of Paradigm Reference Studio 100's and CC, for merging w/ some Proton separates and decent Polk SDA's to create HT for the home. Probably suffering from buyers remorse a bit later and wondered if there was anything about audio on the web - Big mistake. Found Audiogon, AudioReview and Audioweb and became enticed w/ what all the excitement was about. Needless to say, it didn't take long to realize the leader.

Long story short - had received a small inheritance from Dad's estate and within 18 mos it was all sitting on the rack. But that's cool, because I always tried to have what I "thought" was a decent sounding system - I had no clue what was really out there in the world. So thanks to AudiogoN and all the folks who make it what it is for the enlightenment, and enjoyment.
I bought an obscure cable nobody heard out of a local dealer ´used-cable-box´. Cable looked seroius and got it dirt cheap.

Since noboby knew what it was I made a search on the web. ´Audiogon´ came out on top.

Good thing.
Ultimately it was of course my wife that started me doing this. She couldn't tolerate the "looks" of my old speaker stack, actually they were not terrible 1977 Klipsch Heresies on top of 1959 JBL C38s I inherited. Then my so called 100 wpc amp kept clipping and I'd had it. I didn't even know there was anything beyond the big box stores for six months when I complained to Student of mine, now a colleague "Sufentil" here on the gon about the lack of decent 2 channel audio. Suddenly after 6 months of futile searching for dealers and good web sites he told me where to look! Thanks for making me a nut now!