How old were you when audio gear first caught your interest?

Gotta put those million plus dollar houses somewhere!

In my case the story starts with "Good Night Irene" by Howlin’ Wolf.  Don’t ask me why, I was 2 or 3 years old when in came out and it just captured my young mind.  My parents took pictures of me playing that record on my little plastic record player.  They said I kept breaking the records and when that happened I set up such a fuss that they bought multiple copies every time they went to the store.  Then we visited grandma who had a standup Victorla complete with big horn.  I had to stand on a chair to reach inside to put on each 78 record.  She taught me how to keep track of how many plays were on the steel needle, which had to be changed every 10 hours.  Needles came in an envelope 10 for $1.00.   She engendered my love for jazz.  She had all the best.  Louis, Bessie, Bix, all of ’em.  Anyway, come Christmas 1960 my father bought an RCA console thing.  It said Stereo, but this 12 year old looked inside the works and could see only one woofer and one tweeter.  This prompted a trip the the local electronics parts emporium, remember those?  I wanted the second channel.  What I saw there made me forget all about that RCA console.  What did I see?  My first SME tonearm, the image of which made a indelible impression on my 12 year old self.  At 78, I am still trying to recover my senses.  For those that can put this together in your mind, here I was, an experienced player of records on an antique Victrola, with an arm that probably weighed 5 or more pounds, now all of a sudden confronted with an SME 3009.  An analogy might be the driver of a horse drawn wagon, suddenly and for the first time being confronted with a new Corvette.  It was a life altering experience.

Well I was introduced to three things at the same time, well maybe a slight overlap in one area: I was in the seventh grade(1971) and someone in my class that I developed a friendship with took me over to his older brothers place who had been home from Vietnam about a year, one evening, and that was a moment for me.  I smoked Thai Stick for the first time and sat down to listen to a tape of Emerson Lake and Palmer, first time, recorded live from I believe the Arie Crown Theatre at McCormik Place that he recorded onto this cool little recorder, I think an Uher, but played back on a Tandberg Open Reel Deck through the just released Phase Linear 4000 Auto correlator preamp and a 700 Amp, through floor stander EPI's that had a slanted, maybe 45 degree top portion, all purchased through the military, apparently at a price lower than the army paid for them. I felt like the kid in the film, Almost Famous, being introduced to rock. It forever changed me.  In the upcoming years, I noticed many dealers I walked into back then had in their top-tier rooms those Phase Linear products.

I started DJ-ing at about 16 and purchase my first set of Technic SL1200 turntable at 18.  You couldn't tell me nothing, LOL.  That was 1980, damn I am getting old🙂

I built my first speakers when I was 17.