I'm new to this forum so hello everyone!
Anyway... InfinityZero pretty much hit the nail on the head: I think the first time I really heard metal was when I listened to Metallica's Black Album around the age of 10 or 11!
Sad But True,
Don't Tread On Me...all crushing riffs! It is one of their more commercial albums but the music is top-notch regardless - some of the best heavy music
Ever created in my opinion! Having said that, I'm not a
Die Hard Metallica fan, I just enjoy a good deal of their music. I also love
Pantera - I definitely went through a phase of being obsessed with them! They are the band that really got me into metal per say - I remember listening to their 'best of' album, Reinventing
Hell, for the second time and thinking 'man, this is actually very, very good'...then I heard The Great Southern Trendkill and was shocked by how heavy and
Extreme it was, or at least it seemed so to me at the time as I had not heard much metal previously!
Cowboys from Hell,
Cemetery Gates and
The Sleep were some of my early favourites, and what got me hooked on Dimebag's phenomenal guitar playing. Before that it was mostly
Hard Rock like AC/DC,
Deep Purple, Led Zep etc, with a bit of
Joe Satriani in the mix.
So it was
Pantera who opened the doors for me to start getting into heavier stuff - now it's
Gojira and
Devin Townsend, but still with a healthy dose of
Hard Rock from the likes of Kamchatka from Sweden :-)
Music is one of the purest expressions of human being. 
I don't listen to Rammstein today but when I suddenly hear a song of them somewhere, I feel quite nostalgic. 
