By Paul McGowan From PS AUDIO

I don’t think I have ever seen or heard of anyone simply up and deciding to assemble a high-end audio system out of the blue. I mean, have you? It sounds like the setup for a joke.

Guy walks into a high-end audio shop, sits down in the center seat, and says, “What is all this?”

Not sure what the punchline would be, but you get the point.

All of us had some sort of starting point in our HiFi journey: a friend’s system, a dealer’s demo, perhaps a tradeshow room. And this starting point becomes our baseline for everything that is to follow.

Mine was way back in 1973 when the radio station engineer I worked as a DJ for, Jim, invited me over to his house to hear his system. At the time I didn’t really think of people having a “system”. We all just had our stereos: a pair of speakers, a receiver or integrated, a turntable, and a stack of records.

Walking into Jim’s wonderland the first thing I noticed was his entire living room was built around his system (as opposed to the other way around). There were these massive JBL corner horns fed from big thick speaker cables that snaked their way to stacks of glowing Audio Research vacuum tube electronics.

I was absolutely gobsmacked.

And this experience became my baseline—one that even today serves as the launch pad for everything that has come after it.

What was your starting point?

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