JEZ FORD: Spendor recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, and I gather you were aware of Spencer Hughes’ speakers from near the beginning. Where did you first encounter them, and why did you warm to them?
PHILIP SWIFT: Even as a child I was fascinated by sound and music. While at school I made various amplifiers from scratch and built several loudspeakers.
Then, when I was a student at Imperial College, I began working part-time at the original Audio T hi-fi shop in London’s Oxford Street. We had amplifier test equipment there which was better than most manufacturers had, and we had a proper demonstration room with a custom-built high-quality remote-controlled comparator. We got involved in some quite complex installation projects and we offered home demonstrations and part exchanges — at the time most dealers simply sold sealed boxes with no demonstration and no technical support or after-sales service. We did things very differently and we got noticed — we caught the attention of the hi-fi press, several professional sound engineers, many equipment designers, and several like-minded dealers.
