I was in my second year of college at UCSB and had earned enough money working at a picture frame/headshop the previous summer to buy a used BMW 1600 for all of $1,200. But the hi-fi bug bit hard, and because I had my priorities straight (and my roommate had a perfectly fine VW bus), I decided to sell the BMW and put the money toward a new stereo system.
Getting all the money for the BMW wasn’t easy. A guy showed up who offered me $600 and (I swear) his monkey. I explained that, while I had no aversion to monkeys, money wasn’t thick on the ground, and as students, we were often reduced to rice and canned tuna by the third week of the month. A monkey would starve living with us. We finally settled on $1,200 and no monkey; a better deal for all parties, human and simian.
After much angst deciding between unwieldy Tympanis and only slightly less manageable Quads, I bought a system from Ken Kreisel at Jonas Miller in Los Angeles: Quad ESL 57s, 33 preamp and 303 amp, and an AR turntable. Certainly, it was the best-sound coming from any college apartment.
Funnily, I still have a pair of Quad 57s (rebuilt, of course), which remain as magical today as they were in the tie-die days of Santa Barbara.