I couldn't envisage how I'd be able to get a pair of 350-lb Reference Ones down the steps into my basement listening room. Reina in his September 2011 review, offers astonishingly uncolored sound quality for just $150/pair.īut it has been two Jones designs for Pioneer's Technical Audio Devices Laboratories division (TAD) that have attracted the press's attention at recent audio shows, both designed with no apparent limit on the bill of materials: first the floorstanding Reference One ($78,000/pair), then the stand-mounted Compact Reference CR1 ($37,000/pair plus matching stands for $3600/pair). The Japanese company had established a state-of-the-art speaker-design facility in Southern California, and Jones was invited to lead the design team.Īndrew Jones designed some superb-sounding speakers for Pioneer, including the S-1EX, which Kal Rubinson enthused over in the March 2007 issue of Stereophile and, more recently, the SP-BS41-LR, which, said Robert J. Jones followed Fincham across the Atlantic, where he worked on Infinity's Prelude, Overture, and Reference Series speakers, before joining Pioneer in 1997. Fincham led a team of young engineers, including Mike Gough, who eventually joined B&W, and Yorkshire-born Andrew Jones, who became KEF's Chief Engineer in 1989, before Fincham was lured to Harman's Infinity division, in Northridge, California, in 1993. Cooke left Wharfedale in 1961 to found KEF Electronics Ltd., where he subsequently appointed Goodmans designer Laurie Fincham as Chief Engineer in 1968. Wharfedale was founded by Gilbert Briggs in 1932, who in the 1950s handed over the reins of Technical Director to fellow Yorkshireman Raymond Cooke. High-end audio is in some ways a dynastic beast, though without as many "begats." One of the world's most successful loudspeaker manufacturers in the years following World War II was the Wharfedale company, from Yorkshire in the North of England.
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