I have been a music lover all my conscious life.
Up until I left home I was content to listen to music on really basic equipment I was completely unaware of anything else existing. At school we had an all in one mono record player, at home a radiogram. I made recordings on a mono reel-to-reel tape recorder but listened to them happily on the tiny built in speaker.
When I left home for my first job I missed playing records, I just had my tape recordings, so I decided to see what a record player cost. I went to the local music shop and bought a magazine or two - all the magazines were technical back then and stuff got measured, the subjective reviewer BS was still years away.
Anyway I was an engineering apprentice with little money but a bit of aptitude and I first bought a Garrard SL75 turntable, was surprised it didn't come with a cartridge - I had a lot to learn - bought a ceramic cartridge and wired it mono so I could play it through the microphone input of my tape recorder.
All the while I had no interest in or, perhaps, sensitivity to, what is known as sound quality.
Anyway I built some kits to get stereo and was happy enough just listening to the music I liked.
Then I went to University, Imperial College in London, to study mechanical engineering and found myself fascinated by dynamics ie vibration and sound.
I still had no money though and spent what I had on records not equipment.
In my final year I did get the equipment bug and started DIYing better kit.
Then I got a full time job in Noise and Vibration Research which gave me more money and a better insight into how stuff works.
I started buying better kit and even went to work for Garrard as an engineer for 18 months or so on my way to working in Motor Racing full time, which had always been my goal.
The technical side of record players was pretty well understood back then (1975) though then, as now, lots of engineers and pretty well all non-engineers use static thinking for dynamic systems so are wrong on most things dynamic.
Once the subjective idea of reviewing kicked off such that people with little or no understanding of how things worked (and therefore what was plausible) took off and no measurements were done I found it exasperating.
I had more money and less time but knew performance improvements would come from transducer improvements, though I did buy electronics suitable to drive my speaker choice or matching systems to look nice.
Here is an oasis of good sense and politeness most of the time and I don't bother with any other site much any more.
I have all the kit I will ever need this lifetime so am not planning to buy anything more (that doesn't mean I won't though
)