THE SHIFTING TIDES OF SOUND

Cambridge Audio turns 50 this year, and continues to adapt to changing trends and listening habits while catering to purists with CEO James Johnson-Flint at its helm. He shared his thoughts with us.

On the forward march of technology:

“There’re still advancements to be made for smaller, easier to use, and better sounding products. Digital technology, for example, is being improved to extract more detail from the source. Speakers are continually sounding better, too.”

On critical listening:

“I think part of the problem is this: younger people are constantly in a rush, and don’t take the time to listen to things. They also tend to buy with their eyes. Many people may just go with whatever’s ‘good enough’, but there’s really a discernible difference between the best products in any category.”

On designing speakers that cater to a range of different environments:

“Traditional home audio performs best in a specific configuration, with its listener in the sweet spot. We’re obviously catering to these people. But we’re also here for the others ‒ our Bluetooth speakers, for instance, are optimised to simply just work. Of course, the sound may vary a little in different environments, but they’ll likely sound their best in most of them.”

On the advent of streaming as the de facto avenue for listening to music:

“It has, and it’s exciting because streaming allows people to explore new music like never before. We want to extract as much detail as possible, especially for high resolution services like Tidal, and Wi-Fi technology can now let us do that. We are actually best known for our streamers currently, and they have the largest order backlog. It’s partly due to Stream Magic, our proprietary streaming technology.”

On test tracks:

“My top tracks include ‘God Bless The Child’ by George Benson & Al Jarreau, ‘Don’t

Know Why’ by Norah Jones, ‘Let Her Go’ by Passenger, ‘Missing’ by Everything But The Girl and ‘Back to Black’ by Amy Winehouse.”