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

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.

@faustuss 

"I'm right with you there! Lots of people though and because of municipal services reaching areas that couldn't previously be developed we're using up land fast."

Protect your precious plants. In 1978, when I bought this house, we had zero deer in my neighborhood, before they developed adjacent Scotch Plains. Now they are here and everywhere throughout our neighborhood every day, they like my back yard, often 6 of them resting there. 

We had a bad winter, Ice on top of 10" of snow, which was on top of prior 12" of snow. They ate all kinds of things they never ate before, azaleas, rhododendrons, forsythia, including bark of trees. They chewed our Hydrangeas down below ground level.

My father was a passionate audiophile who began his journey in 1948 with a single Altec 604B speaker. Growing up around his hi-fi system, I was exposed to high-quality sound from a very early age.

My own first stereo system appeared in my bedroom when I was 14, in 1967. It consisted of a used Marantz 8B amplifier, a Rek-O-Kut turntable, a Dynaco PAS-3X preamp that my father built, and a pair of JBL speakers.