OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION Tetsuya Itani

This year’s hero is very much unsung, but his prodigious engineering skills have helped lift hi-fi sound and technology to its present heights

Tetsuya Itani has an enviable CV. He started working as an engineer at Technics way back in 1980 and his first job was to take part in the development of the company’s first CD player, the SL-SP10, which was released two years later. He was a software engineer at the time and still holds many patents to do with CD player control protocols.

Since those early days he has been instrumental in the design of various Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray players for Panasonic (Technics’ parent company), and helped to develop the HDMI standard, before returning to the premium audio brand for its re-launch in 2014. At Technics he has overseen the development of a series of class-leading products that have helped to establish the company as one of the market’s core hi-fi brands once again.

We have been fortunate enough to meet Mr Itani on multiple occasions over the past decade or so, and he comes across as a charming, understated and deeply knowledgeable person. He’s remarkably generous with his time and happy to answer any question no matter how trivial or controversial it might seem. This kind of candid attitude is rare from those who work for such large multinational industrial behemoths.

It was on a trip to Technics HQ to hear some new products that we became aware that Mr Itani is not a typical ‘suit’. He has exquisite taste in recordings; something that’s obvious when he plays us a series of stunningly produced records when demonstrating the then-new SL-1000R high-end record player. That we’ve since chosen to use the SL-1000R as our reference turntable says everything about how good we think that product is.

Mr Itani isn’t a household name in audio circles, but he certainly deserves to be – and that’s why he’s the richly deserving winner of our Outstanding Contribution Award for 2021.

He has been instrumental in the design of various Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray players for Panasonic, and helped to develop the HDMI standard