your first system-

Fiesta75 - that sounds remarkably like my first real system circa 1976, Sherwood receiver (second hand from a college buddy), BIC turntable with Empire cartridge (Christmas gift from my parents), and large Advent speakers (bought with my first real paycheck). The speakers stayed around the longest. I sold them when I got a pair of Magneplanars in 1987. Music was Allman Brothers, Jackson Browne, Neil Young, etc.

Telefunken tube console stereo was my first system in late 70s

Heathkit hifi separates -- power amp, preamp, and AM tuner. A Garrard record changer.  I watched Dad solder together the Heathkit components at the kitchen table. Of course, the Heathkit stuff was all tube, as trannies had yet to make their way out of cheap, drugstore-bought AM radios.  Monophonic, of course. I can't remember the cartridge brand but it had a switchable needle when you wanted to  play a now-obsolete 78. Was it a Shure? As for the speaker, I'm pretty sure it was a Utah. Boy did I love that thing! Naturally, I played my sister's Elvis singles, but my favorite records were a Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony and a "This is Hi-Fi!" demonstration record that featured a recently-released recording by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony.

First system, way back in 1971 was a Sansui 20wpc receiver, Rectilinear 1A speakers, BSR record changer with a Shure cartridge and a Sony cassette deck (pre Dolby B). System was around $575.00 give or take a little. Speakers were connected with 16 gauge lamp cords and the RCA cables were a couple of bucks per pair.   I listened to Tull, Zeppelin, ELP, Floyd, Yes , etc. I bought everything brand new with the money I saved over the summer from working at Burger Chef. I felt like I was on top of the world.

@ghdprentice

Clearly you have put a lot of research into that system… it should be a very detailed and revealing system.

Thanks for your kind words. Yes, I have a ridiculously large spreadsheet w over 100 tabs of researched product comparisons. I wanted a transparent, linear, neutral system which will help future component upgrade evaluations like when I move up to better DACs.

I also wanted to explore tube magic (colorization?) so got a flea watt 300b and will likely get Volti Rival 100db speakers (seems relatively linear/neutral for a high efficiency speaker)- bummer price just increased by $3k recently