Hello good people of ASR, I don't think I ever introduced myself either. I am 56-year-old originally from former Yugoslavia and today residing in Vancouver, Canada. Long time viewer and lurker of this forum, back in 2020, I finally joined up!
It was my uncle that introduced me to the world of music starting with this piece:
RIZ Tosca 5 – circa 1980. It was at his place, I was introduced to records of Sinatra, Beatles, and later on Pink Floyd, Black Sabath, Uriah Heep the rest is the history. Gramophone... it was not just a device for listening to music (in addition to expensive and unavailable tape recorders and before the mass appearance of cassette recorders), it was an institution.We called them the miracle of the 80’s…RIZ TOSCA 5 - 10 and 20........stereo. Of course, world brands were unavailable to us, but over time, Dual, Uher, Marantz, Kenwood, Hitachi and others began to appear, and that's how we entered the world of Hi-Fi through a diamond needle.
Having a good record player spoke about a person and was just as important as today having a car at a young age. Everything was a ritual...removing the record from the cover, cleaning it from dust, removing static electricity, until the moment of lowering the needle into the groove of the vinyl (not by hand, by lifting the handle). If and when a record starts to skip, it was tantamount to disaster...!
Move over to the modern day and we have so much choice to put together excellent sounding systems and enjoy music in so many ways. ASR has played a good part in the choices of gear I made the last few years. I've added: Roon, Tidal, Qobuz, RME ADI-2 DAC, Focal SHAPE-50 monitors, KEF LS-50W system, Sennheiser HD600 and Focal Elegia headphones, to name a few. All this I enjoy immensely and I thank our host of this site as well as all the members who contribute all the useful advice, content and reviews.
My next step is to move back to Europe. I will probably have some questions about the new system I am planning to put together, once settled there of course. Preliminary candidates in the pool are: Genelec’s, EVE Audio, Neumann, NAD, Hypex nCoreX, DALI, KEF’s, so it will be fun to make a next step once the budget and new room/place is known.
In the meantime, may it be marvelous and rock on!