“This brought back a lot of memories for me,” says Eric Kingdon as he is faced with our question: what product are you most proud to have developed in your career?
The industry legend, the “ears of Sony” as he is often described, has a brimming memory bank few others could boast, having been involved in developing, designing and tuning many of Sony’s Award-winning hi-fi and home cinema products over the past 40 years… and counting.
“I’m working on some products right now and it made me realise how long I’ve been involved in hi-fi,” says Kingdon, whose love for music and movies was passed down at an early age by his film fanatic mum, the former further encouraged when he began playing the piano at nine years old.
Not long after, he became interested in all things hi-fi, having heard his first stereo system at his dad’s friend’s house – a Garrard SP25 turntable, Armstrong 521 amplifier and Wharfedale Denton speakers.
Fast forward through his teenage years, where he worked in a music and hi-fi shop, nourishing his hobby and even trying his hand at building his own kit, and he landed a job at Sony. It was the mid-’80s, and a new age of product and technology was dawning.
It’s nigh-on impossible to succinctly sum up Sony’s audiovisual successes since then. Indeed, Kingdon’s wealth of memories over his career is hardly surprising considering that the company’s industry milestones in the 1990s alone included creating the MiniDisc and SACD formats and accompanying players, and producing highly successful kit like the GV-8E ‘video Walkman’, La Scala Two mini system and SS-176E floorstanders. Of course, you had the launch of the PlayStation in that decade, too.
But Kingdon’s favourite product would actually come two decades later, on this side of the millennium, when the hi-fi and AV market was, in his words, “a hive of activity”, as high-resolution sources, networking and multiple speaker configurations were establishing themselves and changing the consumer audio landscape forever.
“The range of products and price points was very diverse and competition was in some ways fierce,” says Kingdon. “So a high cost-performance ratio was essential.” Arguably nailing ‘value performance’ more than any other AV gear in the past decade is the Sony STR-DN1080 home cinema amplifier: the product Kingdon is proudest of.
For the uninitiated, the STR-DN1080 was released in 2017 for £600 / $599 / AU$1399 and won four consecutive What Hi-Fi? Awards as our favourite budget AV amplifier before it was discontinued in early 2021 (its successor, the TA-AN1000, wouldn’t appear until 2023). Indeed, the image above is of Kingdon picking up one of those gongs.
Such was its lasting dominance that it also claimed a spot in our Hall of Fame, joining only 47 other special products released since 1976 (What Hi-Fi?’s birth year).
The myriad awards it received is one of the reasons why Kingdon holds it so dearly in his heart, but the history behind the amplifier’s conception (“it began with previous generations, namely the STR-DN1040”); the calibre of its execution (“its marriage of pure audio balance to AV performance”); and the reactions people had to it (“you can’t help but get attached to something that delivers an emotional response in the listener”) are what truly made it special for him.
“I remember working flat-out for the sound tuning and all of the hoops jumped through to finally capture the ‘lightning in a bottle’ that model represented,” says Kingdon.
He recalls the trolley loads of transformers he would listen to, each with slightly different specifications for acoustic testing, and his scrutiny of the sound quality of different HDMI inputs so that they could be scored and labelled for optimum source applications.
Indeed, paying such attention to detail during the sound tuning process reinforced what he knew: “That the simplest thing could impact the sound.”
And then there was the tuning process’s memorable 'ta-da' moment. “Towards the close of one day in the listening room in Tokyo I needed a particular piece of software to finalise a test, and time was of the essence,” recalls Kingdon.
“I remember thinking ‘no chance’, yet within less than two hours it was delivered by a courier in white gloves, while my boss just grinned at me. Funny, you never forget things like that…”
Kingdon admits there is nothing he would’ve changed about the STR-DN1080’s development, although he does regret one thing: that his old boss in Japan, Kanai-san, is no longer with him.
As you may have suspected considering his long and continuing service to Sony, Kingdon’s teenage hobby hasn’t wavered over his life and career. Today, he owns a variety of systems, from high-end and vintage to modest wireless speaker set-ups, to enjoy music and movies at home, yet he still has an STR-DN1080 in his ‘den’ that he uses almost daily.
“I guess a product becomes truly special when it’s the first thing you switch on when you’re home,” he says. The STR-DN1080 not only brings back memories for Kingdon then, but continues to help make new ones.
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