I grew up in a household with no music until was about 16, then my dad bought a console "stereo" with a disc player - on which he listened to show tunes. I am not sure where my mother developed her distaste for music, her father had been a violin teacher, among other things, but he was killed in WW I when my mother was only 4. I can imagine that listening to beginning violin students would be detrimental
GB Shaw famously said of a violin performance "difficult, I wish it were impossible."
Fortunately for my sanity the local youth club to which I belonged had fairly frequent trips to London for weekend afternoon concerts at he Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall - or sometime to recital halls, so I was exposed to great music, live, hearing the great performers of the late '50s and early '60s.
In my teens I became a "Short Wave Listener" - I listened to the ham-radio bands on an R1155 receiver. That was the receiver installed on WW II Bomber Command aircraft. I could also listen to music, on headphones, through this monster device.
That was a long winded way to say that by the time I was 18 I was totally hooked on classical music.
Financial constraints limited my audio gear to a small mono radio until perhaps 1968 when I was 24. After listening to various systems I purchased a Quad 33, Quad 303, a pair of Quad ESLs, fed from the (inevitable) Garrard 301 + SME 309, with a Shure V15 Type II.
That system was lost when I moved to the US in 1972 and years of stereo receiver + decent but not high end speakers persisted until the High End journey started again in about 1995 with a system based on a C-J MV 52 (which is still in my basement) and a used pair of Quad ESL-63s (which blew up long ago).
