I got into audio gear at an early age (9) when I got a portable cassette tape recorder for Christmas. It was amazing to have such control over sounds/music, especially as a pre-teen in 1969...If you're old enough to remember, there was a time with only 3 TV networks, and some shows would only come on once a year (
10 Commandments,
Wizard of Oz) and the one I really wanted to record was
A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was sooooo cool to be able to record the wonderful Vince Guaraldi tunes and play them back any time I wanted. I was soon out in the carport, in the front seat of our Chrysler Newport Imperial, playing back my parent's late 60s adult comedy 8-tracks and making bootleg cassettes of them. Ah yes, my first experience with being a pirate/bootleg audio outlaw!
Later in high school, I got a decent stereo system with a nice turntable with platter speed/strobe. One day, I was experimenting and started out with two stereo cassette decks and the preamp output from the turntable. I put on a K.C. and the Sunshine Band album on the turntable, then took the LEFT channel out of the turntable and the RIGHT channel out of a prerecorded cassette of the same album, and fed them into the second cassette deck. It took a few tries, but after a while, I was able to 'sync up' both recordings and engage the second cassette deck to make a new, 'hybrid' master tape.
The cool part was discovering I could create a side-to-side 'pan' effect by speeding up or slowing down the turntable. A tiny bit faster would cause the sound to 'start' milliseconds sooner in the left channel before the right channel caught up. Go slower on the speed control, and the right side would playback an instant sooner that the left. This was really noticeable with headphones; once synced up, I just gently adjusted the platter speed up and down to create the left-right pan effect. I wonder if this is how
Tom Scholz of Boston got started?