Tell us about your path to having knowledge about AV gear and how you got here @ ASR.

[Doodski]

I'll start this off. I got into AV gear because I was a serious music listener. I was about 15 years old and worked in a pretty good and large privately owned AV store. I started as the box boy then I was installing car stereos and then I took the initiative and bought myself dress clothes and I started selling when the boss was on holidays for a couple of weeks. So upon returning the boss saw me dressed up and figured I had the desire so I graduated to the sales floor. I remained on the sales floor from that point forward. Then after taking that employer to the Labor Relations Board twice for not paying me all my wages I defected to the competition and over the years I became the store manager. Then I met a woman about 500 miles away so I packed up my stuff and moved there and I worked for a major AV chain. So I have about 9 years in AV sales and as a store manager. Then I was very burned out on sales as I had not taken a holiday for over a decade and so I looked around for another occupation and I returned to study and that's when I received my electronics education and worked as a electronics technician until I decided it was pretty obvious that I excelled at mechatronics more so than most other technicians around me at the time. So I received a bunch of training from various Japanese electronics manufacturers and worked my ass off and excelled at being a mechatronics technician. I operated as a technician for about 15 years. All in all I have about 24 years experience working in the AV gear industry. Then I worked in downhole tools manufacturing as a QA/QC tech and then I was assembling the electromechanical systems manufacturing heavy wheeled or tracked equipment used in the oil and gas industry. It's been a fun ride and sometimes it was a pain in the ass but I gleaned a lot of experience, a lot of AV gear and AV gear knowledge over the years and ended up here @ ASR somehow. Perhaps I was researching a model of gear and found an ASR link and clicked on it. I do remember immediately thinking that this is a awesome website that I can fit into and participate in with other like minded peeps and I joined ASR right away.

 

[TheBatsEar]

That is quite some experience you accumulated.

For me it's more simply. I loved music as a child. Eventually i got my hands on an old mono record player and i played my 5 records to death on it (Kraftwerk Electric Cafe, Peter Gabriel So and some compilations).

I got a double tape deck like this for christmas, probably the best thing i ever got:

Eventually i got some old car speakers, they looked like these:

I put them into a box and hooked them up to my tape deck (my mother nearly killed me when she learned i had taken apart the tape deck) and was blown away. STEREO! A hint of bass! Clear voices!
And that got me started on my journey to get better and better music reproduction.

In the late 90ies i was pissed that i bought new stuff for thousands and thousands, but the sound quality basically didn't change and i left the hobby for a decade or so.

In 2015 or so i started again with a more rational, measurement based approach, and a few years later i found ASR.

 

[sergeauckland]

For me, it started when I got a Philips battery portable record player for my 11th birthday. That record player would eat U2 batteries for breakfast, but went everywhere with me. Even played on the School Bus if I removed the spring on the arm so it tracked at several pounds rather than grams! (how's that for mixing my units?)

I was then hooked on electronics and audio. Built several amplifiers, modified all sorts of stuff.

Studied electronics at University, then got my first job designing studio mixers and tape duplicators. Couldn't believe my luck, being paid to do my hobby.
Worked in the Broadcast industry pretty much all my life except for a three year break when I tried to be a high-end HiFi dealer and failed miserably as I couldn't bring myself to sell any Foo, nor any product that didn't make engineering sense. Totally misread my customers' motivation. They didn't want 'better', they wanted new!

Got back into the broadcast industry where I was much more at home. Over the years, worked for Rediffusion, Ampex, Marconi, Pye TVT, plus a few smaller companies. Retired now just short of 20 years ago, having had enough of Hotels and Airports, and changes in the industry, from a Broadcast Engineering led one, to an IT led one, where the old experienced engineers were laid off to be replaced by IT whizz-kids who wouldn't know an XLR from a TRS jack, or why you can't unbalance a phantom-powered mic!

Still playing around with electronics, especially vintage stuff from the 1930s onwards. Still listening to music, a couple of hours every day at least.

S.