“You feel like something's happening here – it feels like being on the cusp of something special”, says Monitor Audio Group CEO Robert Barford. Well, he would say that wouldn't he? Yet talking to him, you really get the sense of a company in transition from one that has perhaps been trying to please too many people, to one that's rediscovered its own sense of purpose.

Could this be because the company has a highly charismatic new leader, a sort of Ivor Tiefenbrun or Antony Michaelson-type figure? In a word, no. I don't think Rob will mind me not including him in this group of dazzling personalities because my impression of him is that he's an extremely knowledgeable, experienced and savvy professional with a laser focus on what he wants to do – and he lets his background do the talking…

So Rob's a maverick speaker designer right, or some great audio visionary who invented technology that we now take for granted? Again, no. “I started in the audio industry with Monitor Audio six years ago,” he tells me. “I live in Rayleigh so I'm local, I was brought up in Grays, Thurrock. I studied insurance and accountancy, and had a flair for the latter – so ended up at Ernst & Young; I'm a qualified Chartered Accountant from E&Y. But I've always seen myself as more of a commercial accountant – running businesses has always been my interest.”

At this point, some passionate audiophiles will be sighing. “Just another money man”, they'll be thinking to themselves. But here's the thing – it's all well and good to have a charismatic engineer running a company, but it means nothing if it cannot grow and prosper. Personally, I've seen so many gifted individuals start up, launch a great new product, and then fall flat on their (proverbial) faces because they can't make the numbers add up. Rob's background involves spending very big money, turning ailing companies around and making them thrive again…

“I moved into shipping, starting as a financial controller and ending up being a Chief Financial Officer. But I felt pigeonholed – and it's not my passion, it wasn't what I enjoyed. I've always loved my music and was looking to move, which is why I got involved with hi-fi. What the UK audio industry struggles with is that it's full of great people who have only worked in hi-fi. It needs to strike the right balance between audiophiles and bringing in talent from outside. Coming from private equity where you restructure a business and move on every four years, I wanted to be part of something – and this company gave me something to be part of and get behind.”

Rob is absolutely right, of course. When I joined the industry in 1993, it was full of characters. As well as the aforementioned Linn and Musical Fidelity founders, there was Roksan's Touraj Moghaddam, Pink Triangle's Arthur Khoubessarian, Michell Engineering's John Michell, NVA's Richard Dunn, Arcam's John Dawson, Naim's Julian Vereker, Nottingham Analogue's Tom Fletcher – the list went on and on. You had big personalities – 'hi-fi rock stars' – running things, and it's fair to say that often the companies weren't being primarily run as a business. Rob argues that it might be cool to be a swashbuckling founder/owner, but the company foundations need to be firm for it to survive, let alone prosper.

THE RIGHT STUFF

He joined Monitor Audio Group as Finance Director, then ended up as Operations Director, and then CEO, effective 1st April 2022. “It's fantastic,” Rob tells me, “because I have this wonderful team of audiophiles and enthusiasts, but we need to run it as a business. There needs to be that person at the top who's orchestrating things and I am supported by our Chairman and owner Andrew Flatt, who still is passionately involved.”

He continues: “I think that, in a way, MA has lacked an identity for a long time. If you look at some of the big companies in electronics they start up with someone who's an entrepreneur and it becomes focused around that person, but they struggle to transition when they move away from the business, which to some extent is inevitable. MA has been fortunate, as the leadership has always been progressive allowing the Group to evolve, but now the identity of the brand is clear for all to see. We have a whole new management team that is putting into place all the building blocks we need to propel the group forwards with a solid, clear, consistent approach.”

I think he's got a point. I'm just about old enough to remember the very first incarnation of Monitor Audio, run by its founder Mo Iqbal who started the business near Cambridge, back in 1972. When I was first reading hi-fi magazines in the late seventies, the company had an upmarket and conservative image, doing high-quality mid-to-upper priced speakers for the well-healed middle classes who you might expect to see driving Volvos, Rovers, Audis and SAABs of that time. The company's designs competed with the likes of KEF, Celestion, Rogers and Mordaunt Short, and had a refined, subtle and detailed 'BBC-like' sound. You really knew where you were with the brand, back then.

Rob says: “For me, I am not going to be the person who gives this business its personality; I'm the businessman who's trying to get that out of the people working for us. We try to create an identity which allows everybody in the company to point in the right direction. That's what Monitor Audio has been missing for a long time. We are stewards of a great business that has lost its founder, regathered its purpose and is moving into something that needs to be sustainable for a long time.”

So Rob's plan is to provide a rock-solid foundation for the company, and then let the clever people that he's hired, get on with things. He is surprisingly candid about this. “People say, why would you put a non-audio person at the top? Well, Monitor Audio has a future beyond me. I don't come here with an arrogance, I come with something that's sustainable for a long time. And everybody should recognise this company for what it truly is, and part of our branding is that we're going to show the world who we really are. I know that people don't tend to like accountants running businesses, but my mission is to run the business with stability, structure and confidence in the market, in a very positive framework. We need to get the best out of those people.”

That is precisely what he is now doing – and it's fascinating to see. Rob recognises that Monitor Audio must play to its strengths, and one key example is that it is a fully independent company. It doesn't have a much larger corporate structure where it's a small fish in a large pond. Instead, it can be focused and nimble – a sort of speedboat compared to a supertanker…

He says: “We're an independently, privately-owned business that is going up against companies owned by large conglomerates with huge pots of resource; just on their own they're four or five times the size of us. I think it may come across externally that we have a similar ownership structure as these, but actually we should be shouting about us being an independent, privately owned British business – that has aspirations to push back those big companies. So we're getting back to feeling more like a family concern, less impersonal. That's not going to stem from me doing that at the top, it's going to come from a well resourced, recruited, hungry management team that's well networked within the industry.”

“We're talking about my Technical Director Michael Hedges, and Charles Minett who's our Product Design Director who's worked for us for twenty years now – that's our team of brand ambassadors who are really going to drive this business forward from an industry audio perspective. We have ninety-two people working for us now; when I started in the company five or so years ago we only had fifty. A lot of the new people coming here has been down to our investment in Research & Development, especially with the acquisition of Roksan.”

POWER STATION

Those familiar with the twists and turns of the audio industry will remember that Monitor Audio purchased Roksan in 2016. Rob explains: “When we bought the company, we had no electronic or software engineers from it, so we recruited Jon Green from Naim Audio, who we have given full freedom to develop this cult electronics brand. I asked him why he left such a respected and established company to come onboard, and he said: “To be honest Rob, it's because you've given me free creative license to develop the brand.” We know that we have got to do something different with Roksan, and that we can't play it safe. We need to think outside the box because there are already companies out there playing it safe and they are doing a very good job.”

In the past couple of years, Rob has invested heavily in Roksan. “We have a team of ten engineers across software and electronics alone, and my whole R&D team has now increased from fourteen up to thirty-four. Our technical director Michael Hedges did his apprenticeship under Dean Hartley, our previous technical director who left the business five years ago. Michael went to Jaguar-Land Rover, and then came back to build this team into what we consider a world-class engineering and design resource.”

Along with the software and electronics team, there is also a strong in-house product and mechanical design team who are now coming up with fantastic things. “They're really starting to have an impact now. We also have Andrew Dutton from Arcam, we have ex-Cyrus engineers in there, and Michael Johnson has come back to us from KEF on the marketing side. We've really been able to pull some of the best talent from around this industry, as people are finding what we're doing interesting. And there's more coming, which is fantastic!”

All well and good, but how do you handle a brand like Roksan if you're a brand like Monitor Audio? After all, the auto industry is full of tragic tales of ill-fitting mergers and acquisitions – from Daimler/Chrysler to BMW/Rover and Ford/Jaguar. Rob agrees, saying: “I think it was naive to think we could just buy Roksan, slot it in and sell it through our distribution and it would be fine – you have to ensure you have a structure and an investment pot available to give the business some legs. What we inherited were six very well engineered products, but there was little consistency between them in terms of design – and they were all coming to the end of their production lives…”

Now, Roksan, with Jon Green's new electronics and software engineering team, plus the mechanical engineers becoming fully embedded within the Monitor Audio Group R&D team. The fruits of this additional focus, resource and drive are starting to shine through, with the new-from-the-ground-up Attessa range getting rave reviews.

“The investment required to launch a range like that reaches into the millions”, explains Rob. “We're close to replacing a number of ranges with three new ranges by 2024. Monitor Audio Group is very much a two-channel hi-fi specialist. We see ourselves as a group of brands that doesn't discriminate – if you're in the market for high-fidelity music playback, we're as strong as any competition out there. In terms of turntables, Roksan has a fine legacy, which we continue to evolve and finesse with Xerxes and the most recent Attessa Turntable.”

In Rob's view, now that the new engineering resources are in place and delivering results, the problem is getting the message out to people that Monitor Audio Group is firmly back on track – and the quality of the products is very high. He tells me: “In fact we have more of a brand image issue than a product problem. This team of engineers has taken it to the next level, and we're seeing that with products such as Hyphn which ends our fiftieth anniversary celebrations, and also the new Creator CI series which we're just launching at the moment. The standard of the product and the delivery is incredibly high – so it's about telling everyone out there who we are and what we're doing…”

The result is that the company is a hive of activity at the moment. “We're now starting to come out to the world, and have been doing a lot of work over the past six to seven months in getting the message ready. We're looking at building new websites, and we've just opened up a 6,000 square foot creative studio. All my R&D is in one space with the marketing and communications team, and we're developing 5,000 square feet into a training centre and museum. All of that will help to tell people who we are.”

The sense is that the company is now very much on the front foot, with a strong but simplified product portfolio – and lots of other ideas in the pipeline, too. “So we've got significant investment going on here, and the culture is really buoyant and creative with a nice company culture. We're trying to stay true to ourselves, knowing who we are as a business. We are scaling our speakers back to Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum – plus CI and Hyphn, getting a more focused Monitor Audio speaker range. We're trying to do less, but better – knowing ourselves lets us do this.”

He wants to underline the benefits of being a mid-sized independent hi-fi company on a firm financial footing – despite these troubled global economic times. “I certainly think the whole UK audio industry is crying out for a large, independent manufacturer to do it really well, which is stable and can be trusted to be a partner for five, ten, fifteen years. Certainly now you see a lot of volatility with some speaker brands. What better than an independently owned, creative, forward-thinking British audio brand such as ourselves to come into that space? We want to do things differently, and we're saying to people, “listen again”. Come and listen again to Monitor Audio, as you might be pleasantly surprised. It really comes back to us being an independent, privately owned business.”

Why the emphasis on the ownership of the company? It might seem blindingly obvious to corporate types, but does it affect customers in any way? Rob says that it allows creativity that you may not otherwise get, and there is also the ability to implement ideas in a relatively short timeframe. “Our decision making is very quick, now. Our new flagship Hyphn loudspeaker is about elevating the brand, and despite its complexity was signed off after a twenty minute discussion, whereas in a large organisation that could have taken six to twelve months to approve. That's the speed at which we can work, we can make decisions fast. We have an immensely exciting ten year roadmap, but it's only crystallised about three years in advance. We want something to talk about every year, we always want to try to bring something new to the market, to do something a bit differently.”

INTO THE FUTURE

“As a business we're focusing on passive speakers, electronics and custom install”, Rob explains. “Within the next two years our custom install offering could look at generating over fifty percent of our turnover – it's already over a third now – but the brand value and equity really comes through on the music side, which is our passion. There's a drive towards active loudspeakers and I get that, but inexpensive wireless active is not a place we really want to be and expensive active is a major outlay. Going forward, there is definitely a shift to active and it's a space that we're looking at, but in our space passive is still more important. All the same, you should see some exciting things coming from us from 2025, we're going to be taking an approach similar to that of Hyphn, pushing boundaries, being innovative.”

Before that, Roksan fans should look out for the new Caspian range coming out in 2024, and a bigger brother to that the next year. Rob tells me that the company will continue to do Compact Disc players, but they're in the twilight of their life now. “Music has been a massive part of my life, but I think people's way of listening to it is changing. CD is fading out because the industry is struggling to get disc transport mechanisms, and streaming is taking over due to its convenience. People want something a bit different in their homes, they don't want to be as mainstream though – and that's the opportunity for us…”

So, as Monitor Audio's fiftieth-anniversary celebrations come to a close, the corks are picked up off the floor and the champagne bottles go into the recycling bin, we see a company emerging from its party in a fittingly optimistic and buoyant mood. The new Hyphn flagship loudspeaker is a lovely present to itself, and there's a real buzz now about what's happening at Roksan. Rob concludes, with a seriousness typical of an accountant: “A huge amount of investment has now gone into this business, and is finally coming on stream. Monitor Audio is confidently and bolding moving forwards with a great team onboard, staying true to its values.” So watch this space…

For more information visit Monitor Audio