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Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

During a recent trip to the U.K., I took the opportunity to visit a handful of British audio manufacturers whose products have always fascinated me and one of them is Cambridge Audio, the subject of this installment in Hi-Fi+’s “Meet Your Maker” series of articles.

Let’s start with the most basic point of all, which is that Cambridge Audio—despite its name—is for the most part not based in Cambridge, but rather in London (although a few members of the Cambridge software development team do still maintain a presence in Cambridge). Hence, a lovely poster seen at the company’s headquarters that shows the London skyline set against the Union flag, with a legend that reads, “Designed with passion in London – Cambridge Audio.” Cambridge’s headquarters can be found in the Southbank area of London (actually, only about a 25-30-minute walk from the famous Waterloo train station) on a small, narrow thoroughfare called Hankey Place. Part of the charm of present-day London is that it somehow integrates modern and quite old structures (and streets and lanes and thoroughfares) to form an appealing, eclectic whole. Cambridge, as we will discuss in a moment, combines elements of the old and the new in high-end audio, but with a pronounced emphasis on the new.

Next, let’s acknowledge that, in keeping with modern trends in audio, Cambridge’s products are designed in London, but built offshore—though the company maintains a very seriously-minded team of product/QC engineers who keep strict tabs on product output from factories abroad. Those same engineers maintain feedback loops through which problems rapidly can be addressed or through which product improvements can be put in place, as needed. But a key point is that all product design, development, and support efforts continue to be based in London, which I think gives Cambridge products a distinctly British flavour, no matter where they may be constructed.

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

 

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

At Cambridge’s Hankey Place facility a visitor will find (by my count, at least) five modern-as-tomorrow engineering sub-teams: one focused on electronic engineering, another on product design (and mechanical engineering), a third on software engineering, a fourth dedicated to acoustic design, and a fifth team focusing on service/QC and product testing. With this arrangement, Cambridge Audio vividly demonstrates that it is by no means a small, artisan, “cottage-industry” operation. Rather, Cambridge Audio represents a blend of old-school craftsmanship with rock-solid emphasis on sound quality, but with a completely modern commitment to build modern construction techniques (focusing on consistency of production and long-term product reliability), product ergonomics, connectivity, and especially on product usability and convenience. Indeed, the firm works very hard to make sure its new-generation digital audio products are supported by apps that are cleverly conceived, functionally sound, and very user-friendly. 

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

 

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Alongside the cutting-edge technology, there is a sixth team charged with marketing support (that is, creating both print and online product documentation, support materials, product literature, technical white papers, web information, and promotional materials). I mention this latter point simply because, in the modern era and especially within the related worlds of Internet-based content streaming and computer audio, more than half the battle for any manufacturer involves explaining exactly what new multi-function products are and can do. If you’ve logged any time with, say, products such as Cambridge’s versatile DacMagic Plus DAC/headphone amplifier/preamplifier you’ll appreciate what I mean. Happily, Cambridge understands—better than most manufacturers, in my view—that proper documentation and support materials are literally part of a product’s design—not extras haphazardly tacked on as afterthoughts at the end of the design process.

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

I am a stickler for well-crafted product documentation and collateral materials, so that it was gratifying to see that Cambridge has an entire marketing support team working in this area (complete with a documentation overseer who makes sure support materials are in order before new models are released for production). Frankly, modern digital audio products have become so complex and have so many interactive and interdependent features and functions that end-users need all the help they can get in order to keep things straight. Happily, Cambridge understands this and has responded accordingly.

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

 

Hi-Fi+ Editor Alan Sircom and I had a chances to see each of Cambridge’s engineering groups in action, noting that the electrical engineering team was hard at work testing some soon-to-be-released new models (which we were asked not to photograph). The mechanical team, which also does the lion’s share of industrial design work for the firm, in turn showed us how CAD/CAM design tools are used to convert product idea into product packaging concepts and, finally, into finished product designs. Several of the photos accompanying this article will serve to give some idea of how paper sketches become onscreen computer-visualised designs and of how the designs in turn become finished projects.

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Not being software design specialists, we could only partly appreciate the lines and layers of code appearing on the screens of software team members labouring diligently to craft next-generation Cambridge software apps. But, as Simon Hewitt, Cambridge Audio Director of Marketing, astutely observed, “where once we might have focused primarily on electrical circuit design and mechanical construction for our products, we now must also focus on questions of convenience, connectivity, and especially ease of use from the very outset.” In the brave new world of high-end audio, products are judged not only by the sounds they produce, but also by the ease with which product functions can be accessed and put to use.

But another thing Cambridge grasps with great clarity is that, for modern content-streaming-oriented products (and especially for Apple-compatible products), regulatory and qualification testing are major hurdles any manufacturer in the market segment must face. Compounding the problem, Apple’s designated testing firms are contractually restrained from providing consulting help for manufacturers whose products are under test. Thus, an audio manufacturer might learn that its latest would-be Apple-compatible product has failed a qualification test, but the test agency will not be allowed to say why the product failed, nor will it will be allowed to provide help in correcting the problem(s) at hand.

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Many qualification tests involve the finer points of EMI (electro magnetic interference) tests, where products are examined both in terms of their resistance to EMI from without and in terms of their ability to prevent generating EMI “noise pollution” of their own. Clearly, this is a highly specialised area where not all audio firms have deep expertise, but Cambridge has had both the foresight and means to tackle the problem head-on. Specifically, Cambridge has taken the extraordinary (and costly) step of building its own internal EMI test chamber. In this way, Cambridge can put its new products through rigourous batteries of internal tests well before submitting them for external qualification tests. Cambridge acknowledges that this process does not necessarily mean all Cambridge models will pass qualification tests on the first try, but it does mean that problems, if any, are much easier to spot and rectify later on. Cambridge believes, probably with good reason, that its approach is far preferable to the scenario many of its competitors face, where a failed qualification test could mean the manufacturer would, almost literally, be “flying blind.”

 

Interestingly, Cambridge headquarters is located immediately adjacent to the offices for Richer Sounds, Cambridge’s exclusive UK distributors/retailers. According to Cambridge this location makes for a mutually beneficial arrangement where it becomes possible for Richer Sounds to invite sales team members from across the country to come to London for the day, specifically to receive in-depth training on Cambridge products. It also allows for visits to Cambridge’s listening room.

In the listening room, Alan Sircom and I had the chance to audition the firm’s new self-powered Minx Air-series wireless speaker systems, which at the time were only a few days away from release. The little Minx Air systems (and especially the larger Minx Air 200 system) proved to be astonishingly good—enough so that all in attendance agreed that Cambridge had managed to push its wireless speakers across the divide between convenience-oriented “lifestyle” products and serious hi-fi. Since ours is a family-oriented publication, I won’t directly quote Editor Sircom on the subject of the Minx Air 200, except to say that he opined he might be able to do Hi-Fi+’s shortest-ever review, which would read something like this: “Oh, (expletive deleted). This thing is really good.”  Enough said.

Meet Your Maker: Hi-Fi+ Visits Cambridge Audio

Finally, we also took the opportunity to audition Cambridge’s upcoming Aero-series speakers, including a set of the firm’s affordable Aero 6 floorstanders. Like the Minx Air systems (and other Minx-series speakers), the new Aero range uses BMR-type (balanced mode radiator) drivers in lieu of both traditional tweeter and midrange drivers. This design choice, in turn, means that the woofers used in the Aero speaker do not have to serve as mid-bass drivers, but rather can function more or less like pure woofers (or, depending on your terminology preference, as “sub-woofers”). In their own way, the Aeros were just as impressive as the Minx Air systems had been (especially when questions of value for money were taken into consideration), though they could not quite match the shock value of hearing the compact Minx Air system produce a huge, room-filling, high-fidelity grade sound.

Tags: CAMBRIDGE AUDIO FEATURED

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