 Over 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. 8000 series 2-channel products |