My first rig.

I bought my first rig when I was a sophomore at UC Berkeley in 1969. It was a Magnavox receiver that I think put out 10 watts a side, a Garrard turntable, and a pair of home-brew speakers concocted by Keith Davenport, the co-op's electronics curmudgeon. The speakers were each a couple of 5" Fisher car speakers mounted inside a wooden box with RCA jacks. For what they were, like zero bass, they were okay. All we did was play stuff as loudly as we could get away with. Some time later, married and working, I yearned to upgrade and heeded a friend's advice to start with the speakers. So off I went to Pacific Stereo in Oakland, looking for any thing that would be an improvement over Keith's earnest, but clearly lacking, boxes.

They must have seen me coming. I'd done some research and was looking for a particular brand and model--long forgotten--that I knew they carried. Bookshelf jobbers that I had just enough scratch to cover. The salesman suggested that I give the Quadraflex line a listen and showed me a couple of big'uns about the size of AR3s. The demo was impressive. These things could easily displace Keith's boxes, and they didn't cost any more than the smaller bookshelf jobbers I'd gone to audition. Oh, I did audition them, but the Quadraflexes simply blew them away.

Flush with excitement, we got 'em home and hooked 'era up to the Magnavox in two shakes, and ... nothing. Oh, there was sound for sure. But the revelation in musical clarity and depth that I'd heard in the store was completely MIA. In fact, they sounded a lot like Keith's boxes. Back in went the boxes. Back in went the Quadraflexes. Back and forth all night. I was crestfallen. I called Pacific Stereo the next day and went through the usual drill: What kind of receiver? What kind of turntable? And so on. Their verdict was that the Magnavox was seriously underpowered to produce the kind of sound I could get out of the Quadraflexes. Well, the budget was shot. And I could play the Quadraflexes a lot louder and with more bass than Keith's boxes. But lacking any experience or awareness that there were such things as magazines devoted to audio, I didn't understand the subtleties of deal showrooms--that second-rate speakers could be made to sound stellar and great speakers like crap. Nor did I realize that "the problem's with your receiver" was simply another polite fiction.

Eventually, I traded the Magnavox in for a Pioneer receiver that put out 35 watts a side. This was a couple of years later and of course the performance of the Quadraflexes didn't improve a whit. My audio buddy later told me that Quadraflex was Pacific Stereo's house brand--the cheapest drivers they could shove into a big ol', thin-walled cabinet. In short, I'd been had. On another recommendation and this time a live audition in a buddy's living room, I found a couple of ADC 303AXs at a used hi-fi shop and, whoa!, what a difference. I consigned the Quadraflexes to the junk closet.

Up until the point of the Quadraflex purchase, I was a music junkie. I'd been reared on AM radio, one-speaker console sound, and I didn't care too very much about the nuances after that. It was this accident of retail chicanery which turned me into a guy who researched as much as he could about audio products before laying out another dime. And it was the ADCs that turned me on to heretofore unheard nuances of recorded music.

Some time later I parted with my first wife and all of the gear except the ADCs. She kept the Quadraflexes-couldn't tell the difference anyway. After a brief interregnum of no music (aaaaaaargh!), I improbably convinced Pacific Stereo's (they were still the only game in town) credit manager that a Sansui AU-417 integrated amplifier, a Pioneer single-play turntable with a Shure M95ED cartridge, and a Kenwood analog tuner would find a safe, risk-free home, and that's how the rig stood for many years. It was serviceable, but I knew I could do better. I never quite shook the upgrade bug, haunted hi-fi stores, and yearned for the kind of sound at home that I heard in the shops.

Well, one year I got a bonus or something and managed to sweet-talk the new Mrs. E into a window-shopping trip in and around Washington DC's hi-fi emporia. After some internal and external haggling, we eventually came home with the Luxman LV105u integrated amplifier, Rotel RT-650 digital tuner, and a pair of Ohm 2X0 speakers. I'd had a love affair with Ohms ever since I'd heard a pair of Walsh 3s at a colleague's house back in the Bay Area, which had been reinforced by a pair of Walsh 5s which graced our band's guitar player's music room. (He also had Conrad-Johnson electronics and a VPI turntable. He once put on the remastered, audiophile grade Rubber Soul LP, and I swore I could have reached out and touched John Lennon ... hair-on-your-neck creepy.) The 2XOs, I later learned, were savaged in these pages (by the long-departed Bob Bottman in No. 37), but I was entranced by the Walsh mystique. They were the most I could afford, and considering what they were replacing, I could have done a lot worse. Hell, I already had done a lot worse.

The Luxman LV105u was a hybrid job, MOSFETs and dual triodes in the output stage and a tone control bypass switch. After an hour or so, I had it running with Mrs. E's Technics SLQ-3 'table with the Shure M95ED, and the Ohms. On went the Parlophone Sgt. Pepper's, and down went my jaw. I heard for the first time in my home a HUGE sound, a gloriously transparent stereo image, and layer upon layer of nuance that I'd never even known existed. I played record after record, scarcely believing what I was hearing--like having a whole new record collection while plopped in the middle of a candy store. Like you, I've read this brand of epiphanic, rhapsodic tell-all too many times. It has passed from the revelatory to the banal, but that one afternoon in Chez Ancienne, the clouds parted, the seraphim poured out beatific choruses, and I became a guy for whom the gear really mattered. It was no longer the simple proposition of getting better. It became the passion for what would do the greatest justice to my first love, the music.

The Ohms' limitations caught up with them as I started listening more carefully and critically to many, many more speakers. Astonishing sounds in limited circumstances by luminaries like the Celestion 700s, Maggies, or a couple of KEF towers taught me that there was a whole lot more I could be getting out of the Luxman and my new Sony ES CD player. And of course that path eventually led to the Legacy Classics, which still hold sway in the living room. Through all of this I've managed to maintain my awe of the technology, the thoughtful, earnest loudspeaker and gear designers, gripped by a zeal to reproduce the highest quality recorded sound. I still mostly despise gear retailers, where honesty and truth are commodities scarcer than phono cartridges. I'm still first and foremost a music nut, and gear is a requirement-but great gear is indispensable.