Alistair is a hands-on innovator. He builds his own hi-fi equipment: from the phono stages to the pre and power amplifiers to the loudspeakers. That’s not uncommon, every audiophile knows a hobbyist, some bloke working in a back shed with a soldering iron, a hacksaw and a vision. But few hobbyists travel overseas to learn their craft and even fewer have worked in responsible engineering positions at the British Broadcasting Corporation. Alistair has. A physicist by training, then a professional engineer who, now that he’s back home in Melbourne, enjoys freely teaching others the craft of high-end audio in his spare time.
“A key thing I’ve learnt in my work,” he says somewhat modestly, “is that design is not so much about the quality of the components: it’s about the quality of the implementation, it’s about the wiring detail of the circuit board. Not just the schematic and how the
