Traditional Values

David Price talks to Spendor Audio’s Philip Swift about the life and times of the classic British loudspeaker brand as it celebrates its 50th anniversary

- David Price

As a student in London, I was very interested in hi-fi and would go to the original Audio T store in Oxford Street – and it was through the people there that I met Spencer Hughes and became a fan of Spendor loudspeakers”, says Philip Swift. “I think at that time he had made a few loudspeakers but hadn’t actually formed a company. John Bartlett – who ran Audio T – said: ‘These are great, we can sell them. If I give you some money can you make some for me?’ This was a measure of the enthusiasm that existed for that original product based on hearing it. Spen was still a full-time employee of the BBC, then…”

Thus was born Spendor’s first loudspeaker 50 years ago – the 1969 BC1. It’s a product that became one of the standout designs of the seventies. What really set it apart was its bextrene cone, as yet unused in the field of loudspeaker design. “The BBC needed a speaker that would let it hear a natural, accurate version of what it was broadcasting and had found that commercially available products didn’t sound much like the human voice and didn’t produce very accurate music. It launched a serious research programme, which identified certain elements within the loudspeaker – the materials, the way the cabinet was constructed and the response – that needed to be right.”