Some audio experiences stick in your memory. For me, one such was in 1978, which I reminisced about in a 1987 review for Stereophile of the Mission PCM 7000 CD player, Mission 780 Argonaut loudspeaker, and Cyrus Two integrated amplifier.1 Mission founder Farad Azima2 was a driving force in the UK audio scene in the late 1970s, when I was deputy editor of the English magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review.
“I used to regularly visit [Farad] at his London apartment and witness stages in the design of a loudspeaker that, in retrospect, would put Mission Electronics on the high-end map,” I wrote in that review. “As well as drinking large amounts of his liquor, night after night I would witness Farad putting record after record on his Linn, listening to what seemed to be innumerable prototypes of what became the Mission 770, trying to match the midrange accuracy of the classic ‘BBC-sound’ Spendor BC1 but marrying it to a less loose bass region, more suited to the special requirements of modern LP replay.
“And to a large extent he succeeded. I can remember an almost painfully exquisite reproduction of Jackson Browne’s live Running on Empty album, Emmylou Harris just taking my breath away with Quarter Moon in a Ten-Cent Town, and Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing causing us to boogie until we were disturbed by the early-morning sounds of London’s pigeons taking their first cough.”
