History
Click here for interview with Philip SwiftOver 20 years on, it’s easy to underestimate the impact the first audiolab products had on the market, but the original 8000A certainly shook up a cosy British audio industry: here was an amplifier designed with the kind of facilities consumers wanted, yet still able to deliver a sound to please audiophiles.
And it sold for a bargain £250, pitching it against market leaders like the A&R Cambridge A60, not to mention the Japanese competition.
The founders of Audiolab, Philip Swift and Derek Scotland, had been involved in the audio industry for some time, working on the fondly-remembered Lentek amplifiers and speakers for the Mission brand, which has recently joined audiolab as a stablemate. They’d also been working on a personal project: an amplifier designed to offer ‘oustanding sound quality at a modest cost’, and perform reliably with a wide range of speakers under real world conditions.
8000A Launched
The development process involved an attempt to measure performance and correlate this with perceived sound quality, and the intention was to develop an amplifier that was foolproof, fully-equipped and yet capable of high standards of performance.
At the same time, amplifiers fell into one of two camps: ‘Fully-loaded’ with facilities and sounding so-so, or simple ‘hairshirt’ designs that were capable of sounding great, but inconvenient to live with.
The 8000A was launched in 1983, and featured high-quality tone controls, a phono-stage for turntables, and a choice of direct or switched speaker outlets. The direct connection gave the best sound, the switched one made life simpler for headphone users.
And right from the start, the amplifier was designed to be the start of a complete Audiolab system: a link could be broken between the preamp and power amplifier, allowing an upgrade with a power amp. At the time the connections were on the then-fashionable DIN multi-pin sockets; it wasn’t long before the conventional phono sockets we all know made their appearance.