My first rig.(Looking Back)

I bought my first rig when I was a sophomore at UC Berkeley in 1969. It was a Magnavox receiver that I think put out 10 watts a side, a Garrard turntable, and a pair of home-brew speakers concocted by Keith Davenport, the co-op's electronics curmudgeon. The speakers were each a couple of 5" Fisher car speakers mounted inside a wooden box with RCA jacks. For what they were, like zero bass, they were okay. All we did was play stuff as loudly as we could get away with. Some time later, married and working, I yearned to upgrade and heeded a friend's advice to start with the speakers. So off I went to Pacific Stereo in Oakland, looking for any thing that would be an improvement over Keith's earnest, but clearly lacking, boxes.

They must have seen me coming. I'd done some research and was looking for a particular brand and model--long forgotten--that I knew they carried. Bookshelf jobbers that I had just enough scratch to cover. The salesman suggested that I give the Quadraflex line a listen and showed me a couple of big'uns about the size of AR3s. The demo was impressive. These things could easily displace Keith's boxes, and they didn't cost any more than the smaller bookshelf jobbers I'd gone to audition. Oh, I did audition them, but the Quadraflexes simply blew them away.

Flush with excitement, we got 'em home and hooked 'era up to the Magnavox in two shakes, and ... nothing. Oh, there was sound for sure. But the revelation in musical clarity and depth that I'd heard in the store was completely MIA. In fact, they sounded a lot like Keith's boxes. Back in went the boxes. Back in went the Quadraflexes. Back and forth all night. I was crestfallen. I called Pacific Stereo the next day and went through the usual drill: What kind of receiver? What kind of turntable? And so on. Their verdict was that the Magnavox was seriously underpowered to produce the kind of sound I could get out of the Quadraflexes. Well, the budget was shot. And I could play the Quadraflexes a lot louder and with more bass than Keith's boxes. But lacking any experience or awareness that there were such things as magazines devoted to audio, I didn't understand the subtleties of deal showrooms--that second-rate speakers could be made to sound stellar and great speakers like crap. Nor did I realize that "the problem's with your receiver" was simply another polite fiction.

Eventually, I traded the Magnavox in for a Pioneer receiver that put out 35 watts a side. This was a couple of years later and of course the performance of the Quadraflexes didn't improve a whit. My audio buddy later told me that Quadraflex was Pacific Stereo's house brand--the cheapest drivers they could shove into a big ol', thin-walled cabinet. In short, I'd been had. On another recommendation and this time a live audition in a buddy's living room, I found a couple of ADC 303AXs at a used hi-fi shop and, whoa!, what a difference. I consigned the Quadraflexes to the junk closet.

Up until the point of the Quadraflex purchase, I was a music junkie. I'd been reared on AM radio, one-speaker console sound, and I didn't care too very much about the nuances after that. It was this accident of retail chicanery which turned me into a guy who researched as much as he could about audio products before laying out another dime. And it was the ADCs that turned me on to heretofore unheard nuances of recorded music.

Some time later I parted with my first wife and all of the gear except the ADCs. She kept the Quadraflexes-couldn't tell the difference anyway. After a brief ...