The person responsible for getting me into hi-fi was my late father - he was an avid hi-fi fan, and I ended up catching the bug!!
I can remember when I was a small boy. After my father got custody of me and my sister from our Mum, he treated himself to a complete Sony seperates system - turntable, tape deck, amp and tuner. My father had built the rack that housed it himself. The amp he had was the one down from what I own. He had the Sony TA-AX2 - my amp is a TA-AX3.
All the hi-fi gear was silver and had that lovely brushed aluminium fascia, which you don`t often get nowadays. my father`s speakers then were the Kef Coda III. Sadly, he accidently damaged these a few years later. He was placing them on the wall brackets in our lounge, when one of them fell on the floor, nearly missing my sister`s head, and the casing split!!
Although when he first got the system home, he couldn`t get any sound from it. After having tried everything possible, even turning the volume up, he still couldn`t get any sound. I was asked to get our neighbour round to see if he could do it. As soon as he came, he adjusted the speaker switch on the amp - and the music was so loud, my father legged it one way, I legged it another and our neighbour went bonkers (not to mention everyone else in the apartment block!!)
My father seemed to like his Kef speakers (which is probably why I own Kef speakers!!), and after the accident with the Coda III`s, he opted for the Kef Carina II. These were a little more powerful than his older ones, and he wasn`t afraid to crank the amp up a few notches - particularly when he was playing any of his Shadows records. Listening to Apache with the volume on 6 certainly sounds good!!
There again, nor was I. If my father wasn`t home when I got in from school, I`d play my Kylie singles at full blast until someone knocked on our door yelling at me to turn it down!! These days, I`m more responsible when it comes to playing music.
My father didn`t just like his hi-fi, he also built some gear himself. When I was 10, my father and one of his mates built a pair of Alexander Cairns ACS12 speakers using some Kef (again!!) drive units. As he was happy with his current Kef speakers, his mate kept the homemade speakers. And while he was good at building gear, some of his projects didn`t go quite to plan!!
I can remember when my father bought a small 14" portable Hitachi telly from a local second-hand shop, along with a small pair of cheap speakers. He thought he could turn a mono TV into a stereo one by disconnecting the cables to the speaker inside the telly, and wiring up the two speakers - unfortnately, when he switched the set on, it worked for a few minutes (there was sound coming from both speakers), but then the speaker went bang. The cause of the problem was the impedance of the telly`s speaker was lower than that of the main speakers!!
I think it was 1992 when my father bought a Marantz CD deck (can`t remember which model it was), and then started buying CDs as well as vinyl records (I was still listening to music on vinyl after he died!!), and he loved the idea of the CD - even though it meant having to build a new rack just to hold his new found collection!!
Back in 1994, we had some severe lightning strikes in our area. The hi-fi got damaged - the TV and video somehow escaped. My father wasn`t able to get brand new hi-fi gear again, so we went round the shops looking for good quality used hi-fi equipment - we managed to get a Sony CD/tape/tuner/amp seperates system for just over £200.
My father tried to get back the ACS12 speakers, but his mate sold them off to pay his debts. So to keep with the tradition, he bought some Kef Coda 7 speakers. Most hi-fi enthusiasts will recognise this design - they`re similar to Kef`s Coda 70.
Sadly, my father died a year after, and I never got the chance to get the system, as most of the stuff in the house was sold - the bloody council!!
After a few years of going through the foster carer from hell, I finally settled in Millbrook, Southampton. At first, I couldn`t buy seperates, so had to make do with a one piece Matsui mini system. My CDs sounded bloody awful on it!!
I first ventured into hi-fi seperates by buying Ariston speakers, an Hitachi receiver (an amp and tuner in one box) and a Philips CD deck - all were secondhand. OK, so it wasn`t as good as the set-up I have now (the speakers were horrid, but what do you expect for £8??), but in total, it cost only £60, and at least it sounded better than the Matsui mini, and there was actually some bass in the music!!
So, after Christmas 2001, I gave the receiver and CD deck to a mate, and gave the speakers to my brother, and set off to buy much better gear with the money I got for Christmas. I was able to splash out on my second hobby, as there wasn`t much going on in the world of Kylie, and I`d bought all the Kylie stuff that was out then, including the 2002 calendars.
Early last year, I spotted a Sony amp in my local Cash Converters (I`m well known there now!!) for £50. It was in IMMACULATE condition - no marks, scratches or large dents. OK, so there`s one very tiny dent, but it`s hardly noticeable, but for its age (20 years old), it`s the best amp I`ve had. I then also bought a Marantz CD deck from the same shop, and a pair of huge Hitachi floorstanders. The good thing was the Hitachis sounded better than the Aristons - the bad thing was that they were larger and proved difficult to integrate into an 8x6 room!!
Five months later, the Marantz packed up, and it was time for the Hitachis to go. So it was off to my local Richer Sounds armed with £100, and a plan to buy some new speakers and hopefully a nicer CD deck. After spending a good two hours in Richer Sounds (another of my favourite haunts!!), I kept to my father`s tradition of using Kef speakers and bought a brand new pair of Kef`s Cresta 1 speakers. Quite how they managed to cut the price from £100 to £40 is beyond me, but at that price, I couldn`t complain!!
I opted for a secondhand Pioneer-PD204 CD deck, as I only had £50 left (the only new CD deck they had at that price range was a cheap crappy one!!), and I had to get some proper interconnects and decent speaker cable. So after paying £30 for the Pioneer, £20 for two Cambridge Audio Atlantic interconnects and then managing to get 8 metres of Eltax OFC speaker cable for £9, I left Richer Sounds with some awesome Kef speakers, a better sounding CD deck, decent leads and only £1 left!!!
So after building my own Kama 5 hi-fi rack and Kala 7 speaker stands to house it all, and then buying a surge-protection power lead to power it, I have the best sounding system in the house!!
My father would be proud that I`ve followed in his footsteps, and carried on by owning hi-fi seperates. For less than £175, I managed to build a system that kicks most one-box systems costing three times as much, and it blows my mate`s Cambridge SoundWorks system right out of the water!!
