Here is a real short and sporadic history of my audio equipment:

The first stereo I remember is an old stereo gram with a valve amp and a drop down shelf with a Garrard 2025TC (?) turntable. This was the family HiFi in our house in the 1960's. I later inherited it and took it away from its big box. The valve amp worked for a few years after I got it (circa 1976?). I painted the turntable a nice shade of mustard and green at some point and it had a variety of Empire, Grado and other cartridges over the years. Nothing ever got rid of the rumble though!

For me to get the garrard, mum had upgraded to one of those smart Silver 3-in-1 units. $199 from K-mart I think. It still had a rim drive turntable, but this one had a platter made of plastic. As you can imagine, this was not a top of the range unit, but they sold well in Australia in the 1970s. It's only redeeming feature was that it had a passive matrix circuit (presumably a variation of the Hafler circuits) and could take an extra set of rear speakers. Sadly, I never experimented with that.

At some point in the late 1970s I bought a receiver, cannot remember the brand, but it had an analogue tuner and facility for 2 sets of speakers! The Garrard went to HiFi heaven at some point and was replaced with a bargain CDC direct drive turntable. This worked for a short time. At some point it discovered that it could no longer detect the rotation speed and just kept accelerating. I was never brave enough to let it go and see if it ever reached a peak RPM!

I replaced the CDC with a nice old Luxman Direct Drive, it was a PD 2XX series I think, with a low mass straight tone arm. A bit of a bargain as the front left corner had taken a knock and was slightly dented.

I had got by with all sorts of cobbled together Frankenstein speakers, but around 1984 when I got my first job splashed out on a pair of KEF bookshelf speakers. I can recall mentioning that I liked a bright clear sound, and boy did they deliver! I reckon they helped bring bats in to roost as well. Poor little blighters got blown to smithereens by a friend in a party once, 2 tweeters, 2 crossovers and a woofer later they came back, but were never really the same.

When I left Australia I left this system with a friend in exchange for $600 (not an insignificant sum). It included a home made sub woofer of sorts, a Yamaha cassette deck and a few other bits and pieces.

For the next year or so I made do with a trusty Aiwa recording cassette Walkman and a pair of portable plug in speakers.

When I settled back in England in 1991 we had (and still have) an old JVC 3-in-1. We bought a Dual CS505-4 and a pair of Castle Durham speakers. At some point we also added a Yamaha cassette deck and a Rotel RCD 855 CD player. This is still the main system in the lounge. The amplifier is a Musical Fidelity A120, a beefier brother to the popular A1. Class A and valve amplifiers are a bit of a favourite in our house. They are handy for keeping your tea warm. You can read about the Rogers HG88MkII that I received as a present in 1991 here.

Now I have a system set up around the computer in my study as well. This is based on the Rogers valve amp, the computer, the Thorens TD165 and the Mordaunt Short 902 speakers. This is mainly to listen while I work, but is also used to record LPs or cassettes for transfer onto CD-R.

So there you have it. Top of the range? Hardly, but then I guess my main aim is to have a system that I enjoy using, like the sound of and don't feel too in awe to fiddle with. Do I like it? Yes. I have two systems that I am happy with, there is room for improvement (an indeed there might be this year) but I can use it and find myself putting record (or CD) after record on. At the end of the day though, I would have to say that what keeps me listening is the records, not the equipment. Luckily it just doesn't get in the way too much!