INTERVIEW: James Johnson-Flint is CEO of Cambridge Audio and founder of Audio Partnership, which bought the company in 1994. We talked about the past, present and future.

SOUND+IMAGE: So Cambridge Audio had several incarnations prior to Audio Partnership’s taking over ownership in 1994. How did you see the company back then, why did you buy it, and how has its market position has been developed since?

JAMES JOHNSON-FLINT: Back in 1994 I saw in Cambridge Audio a brand down on its luck, but with tremendous potential. Back in the early nineties a stack of separates was a must-have in every music lover’s home, and within a relatively short space of time we had a team of designers to deliver some great value product to a market hungry for quality at a fair price. Two years later we won our first What Hi-Fi? Award in the UK — for our very first DacMagic — and we haven’t looked back since.

Today, I’m immensely proud that Cambridge Audio is a globally successful British manufacturing company that develops all of its products — hardware, software and mobile apps — in-house in the UK. We are the only London-based specialist audio company and, 25 years on from 1994, I still love this business, despite the fact that everything we do is so much more complex that it was when we made amps, basically, with knobs and switches on them. Today Cambridge Audio has one of the largest in-house specialist audio engineering teams