I'd have to give credit to my mother who always had music playing when I was a kid. Mostly oldies, Motown and stuff like that. As a teen I took my own interest in music and started purchasing lots of cassette tapes. I would spend a few hours once a week at a local music shop digging through used bins.

I remember buying a portable cassette player that sounded like crap so I took it back and got a more expensive on that sounded like crap but a little better. I would spend hours listening to the radio and flying to it, to hit record, when a song I liked came on. Sometimes I would record music while I was sleeping and filter through the tape the next day to find out who the artists were, so I could pick up their album, hopefully used.

After I got married and my wife and I moved into our first apartment, one of the first things I wanted to get was a stereo system. So I headed off with a budget of about $400 to the local Sears type store called Wards. Now my parents always owned a all-in-one stereo in a box kinda thing so I had no clue what to look for. The guy at the store showed me a Panasonic Prologic HTIB and told me how it could play music and do surround sound for VHS movies. Surround sound, what the heck is that?

So I got this thing home, hooked it up, put on Top Gun and was like, WOW! Later on I got a Kenwood cassette and CD player and my music never sounded better. Then a bad thing happened. We went to visit my wife's family in Arizona and her dad had a full HT system, don't remember which speakers he had at the time, but his gear was all Pioneer Elite. He put on Saving Private Ryan and The Matrix DVD's. I realized what I had at home was not a HT system.

Once we got back home it was straight to CC. To make a long story short, I went through a couple of HTIB systems and then ended up with a JVC DVD/AVR & Sony speakers combo. Still not totally happy I eventually have the sysem I currently own (you guys know the story) but I know I'm not done yet. Music and movies have never sounded better, and I'm pretty content, so what's that voice doing in the back of my head still?