Have you ever asked yourself how you ended up an audiophile? I certainly have, and I haven’t been able to figure it out.
Other audiophiles tell me that their father, uncle, neighbor, or whoever introduced them to quality home music reproduction and the equipment needed to achieve it, but that was never the case for me. My fascination with music and gear goes back further than I can remember: My mom once told me that by age 3 I was climbing the bookcase to put records on the turntable and already knew how to operate the whole hi-fi rig by myself.
Like most American households in the early 1960s, we did have a hi-fi system, and we all loved our music, but my father was no audiophile. Our cobbled-together stereo was modest, with a Garrard Auto Slim P MK II record changer and an oddball Japanese tube receiver called Monacor SMX-50A, which came complete with speakers with oval paper-cone drivers.
My dad was a founding member of the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” school of upgrading, so this system remained unchanged through four moves and five countries until we ended up in Belgium in 1972. By this point, cassettes were taking over from records as the preferred format chez Trei, so we felt it was time to add cassette playback to the system. We had been early adopters of the cassette format1 and owned one of the original Philips Norelco portables, but even my dad recognized its limitations for playing music. We made a few trips to local hi-fi stores, such as Hi-Fi Georges DeCoster in Waterloo, to select a suitable cassette player. These might as well have been trips to Disneyland for me: I was hooked.
It was around this time that I met my first true audiophile, the father of my best friend Gregg. Heinrich (Henry to us) was a
