About
When I was young I listened to most of my music on a cassette recorder, making mix tapes from LPs and radio broadcasts. Late teenage years saw me buy my first 'separates' system with decent speakers and a CD player. But it wasn't until the band I played bass for made a demo in a London recording studio that I realised what I was missing out on. Through studio monitors everything sounded so 'real', vocals were there right in front of me and I could hear every intake of breath and click of a guitar string against a fret.
My pockets weren't deep enough to get anywhere near that sound quality at home but I now knew what was possible and wanted a part of it.
In the nineties (and perhaps even more so today) the Hi-Fi sales jargon was impenetrable with 'rules' that I couldn't fathom and plenty that were just plain wrong... what were these mysteries about component matching, impedance and frequency response curves? I was at the bottom of a long, steep learning curve.
Fast-forward a few more years and this had become a bit of an obsession. I was no longer interested in buying from someone else so I started designing and making my own. Then scrapping them and starting again. And again.. Until I finally did get the sound I wanted from a pile of circuit boards and some DIY loudspeakers. By this time I'd also invested in a couple of pairs of studio monitors to give me a point of reference and comparison.
Alongside this and my day job as an engineer in the aviation industry I also became absorbed in all the new manufacturing technology that was becoming available to small businesses and enthusiastic geeks like me. I could design things on my computer and get prototypes laser cut, CNC machined or 3d printed and delivered to my home with a turnaround time of a few weeks.
Pragma Hi-Fi still operates around these principles outsourcing the PCB fabrication and precision metalwork whilst keeping design, hand assembly and test in-house.