My Dad had one of those all-in-one music centres, which is the first I recall. It would be of seventies vintage, as am I :) In the eighties it made way for a Pioneer separates system which I thought was the bees knees.

At uni, I got my own first proper hifi - based around a Philips CD player, Denon amp and Tannoy M20 speakers. Bizarrely enough, the speakers had been used by Runrig as monitors, according to Sound Control where I bought them ex-demo. Anyway, student days remained much the same though I re-discovered vinyl by way of a Linn Basik, which I loved.

When I started working, I kinda went a bit daft, having owned around ten different pairs of speakers (from the cheap (B&W 600 series) to the very expensive (Audiophysic Avanti mkIII)), settling for the moment on a pair of 30 year old Tannoy Dual Concentrics; at least six cd players, two LP12 Sondeks, a Clearaudio deck, a NA Spacedeck and now that I'm moving back down the ladder (having two young kids) I've settled on a neat little Rega deck with decent MC cartridge (second one - the first got destroyed by my eldest, ho hum)... amps have ranged through solid state and valves, minimalist and normal - via brands like Naim, Crimson, DNM, Eastern Electric and now on an AVI Pre/Power which is probably the best of the bunch. I've been through the 'everything needs dedicated mains' stage (installing a dedicated consumer unit with multiple hi current spurs to power each box), the 'good cables' stage (with fancy cables that can cost more per cable than most people would want to spend on an entire hifi) and even the 'fancy tables' stage, where I deluded myself that putting the hifi on iron and glass tables stacked high improved the sound - it didn't, it just changed it. Luckily, I started to recover and nowadays just try to enjoy what I have...

Couple of years ago I added a digital music streaming player - a modified version of a Logitech Squeezebox called the SB+ - and then another Squeezebox for another room. Last week I bought a stupidly expensive pair of headphones (Sennheiser HD800) as I've been getting pressure from the FPO to scale down the 'ugly boxes' in the front room... sigh.

So, yes, hifi and me - we're like old buddies who should really steer well clear of each other, as we end up spending way too much and getting into trouble... best advice I can give to anyone is to accept that it's never going to sound quite how you would like it to sound, and buy more music instead...

Dual 505
NAD 3020
Mission 70s

My hi-fi history starts with some system I don't remember, but I do remember my Dad playing Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene on it a lot... then I remember the family going out and buying an Amstrad stack system... I think it was from Woolworths. I remember it had a record player, a tuner AND a tape deck! I also remember having to smack the side of the system cabinet hard to stop an annoying judder coming from the huge black speakers.

When the Amstrad finally gave up the ghost (in 1990) Mum and Dad went out and got a new stack system - this time a Sony with a TWIN cassette deck, a graphic equaliser AND a CD Player! How exciting! By this time I had started to get my own gear. I started off by getting a strange Alba record player off the previous house occupants when we moved in. It kind of looked like a DJ console, with a record player on one side, a single casette deck and tuner in the middle, and a built in speaker on the right. Very odd.

Then one Christmas I got an Alba stack system and, joy of joys, it had A REMOTE! When I got my first job (a Saturday job in a Texas Homecare) my mum let me get an Aiwa system on 6 months free credit (it was in her name and I had to pay her back each month). It was great... THREE CD changer, TWIN Cassette deck, DIGITAL tuner, RECORD player... and GRAPHIC EQUALIZER! ! Amazing! But whilst I was at university it developed a curious habit of opening the CD drawer when it was turned off (I thought it was a ghost).

It took a while but when that finally went kaput I invested in a sort of 'proper' hi-fi... a Technics mini separates system on a beech and class stand. I went for it over a Denon because it had a cassette player. I still have the player but I've hardly ever used the cassette deck! It's even worse now I have an iPod...

When the Technics dies we may not bother again. Hi-fi's are messy cumbersome things... so my wife says!

Back 'in the day', I had a nice, chunky set-up of Dual turntable, Rotel amp, Technics tape deck and Philips CD, with some lovely JPW speakers. Unfortunately, over the years, everything's pretty much disappeared/died.

I've been thinking about this recently. I'm shortly about to move into my own place, where for the first time in four or five years, I'll have my 'real' music collection back with me from storage - tapes, CDs, vinyl etc. After all this time, during which I have relied mainly on mp3s, I really want to get a simple vinyl/CD separates system together. What does the Massive currently recommend for hardware - any particular brands or models which you reckon offer maximum value, reliability, quality?

but just for fun, first hi-fi I'd have listened to was in 60s, as a small child, when my Dad fitted a high quality amp into the nice mono radiogramme cabinet that my mum had. He also had a reel-to-reel tape and a record player, on which we'd have listened to Burl Ives, made home recordings etc etc

Mid 70s saw him build a stereo w/ Goldring turntable, Wharfedale speakers, and a Linsley-Hood transistor tuner-amp from a Wireless World design, such as this one
http://sound.westhost.com/jll_hood.htm
A subsequent cassette deck was a bit less successful, but cue family listening to everything from Britten and Stravinsky to the Beatles Red, and the World of Tijuana by "the Mexicans" on Decca ...

1980 and a summer job, and I could afford a stereo of my own. New cassette deck (a front-loading Sony), and second hand amp (Nikko TRM-300 http://audio-heritage.jp/NIKKO/amp/trm-300.html

) and speakers (Trio/Kenwood) bought from a school friend.

Cassette deck was a dog, and mercifully stolen while being repaired, so took a turntable instead, a NAD like this one,
http://www.canuckaudiomart.com/uploads/29/67613_thumb_3ea54834fd5a61a71a...
curiously also made for them by Garrard. Rapidly tired of the Trios, and got some classic Mordaunt Short Carnival IIs
http://www.eastmarinedrive.com/contents/non-static/ms-content.htm, followed in '82 I think by a better amp, a rather dodgy second-hand Marantz PM 350 http://hifigoteborg.se/Marantz%20pm-350%20spec.htm

once quite aptly described as looking like an explosion in a Letraset factory.

The big step, into "real" hi-fi was probably when I got a better turntable in '86, a Rega Planar 2. Twinned with a better amp (a lovely, wood sided A&R A60

http://www.retrohifi.co.uk/ar_cambrige.html, again second-hand) it began a relatively stable period when the only upgrades were a second-hand Linn in about 1990, and a pair of gorgeous Mission 770s- again second-hand-in about '92, which I still own. CD (Philips), tapes (Nakamichi CR1 http://www.classicaudio.com/forsale/nak/CR1A.jpg), and a tuner (Rotel) were added though I never used tapes very heavily after 1981-a pity in a way because even the cheap Nakamichi was a beautiful deck .

And so it stayed for ages, though eventaully the Philips was replaced by a better CD player (Technics, in about 1998), and a newer Arcam amp

replaced the A60. Things got a little complicated after a burglary in 2003, fortunately involving only the electronics, but most of the replacement kit, and the LP12, was traded in when I moved in 2005 into a smallish flat, just keeping the Pioneer DVD/SACD player, the speakers, and a new Arcam Solo.

This is what I use now, having added an Onkyo DS-A1 iPod dock http://www.trustedreviews.com/multimedia/review/2006/01/14/Onkyo-DS-A1-I... . Over at my partner's (larger) place there's a lovely Pioneer/Arcam/B&W/Monitor Audio system, and she now has a Squeezebox in her conservatory, where it is playing Hary Janos as I type ...

[edit: nothing new but playing with imageshack in the spirit of "bring out your dead" thread---here is the Solo's replacement

]

The Netto of the Hi-Fi world, only not half as good