A founder fond of the number seven.

Mission was founded by Farad Azima, a British industrialist born in Tehran in 1943 who had studied at Leeds University and went on to hold numerous international patents in engineering, according to English Wikipedia. The company dates its founding to 7 July 1977, “07/07/1977” in the words of a 2022 press release that describes Azima as “famously fond of the number seven,” and calls Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, its “traditional home.” English Wikipedia’s article on Azima instead says he founded Mission Electronics in 1976, in Cambridge, so we note both. Azima died in August 2020, Wikipedia says; the 2022 release calls him “the late Farad Azima.”

The first product, in 1978, was the 770 loudspeaker, and Mission has made loudspeakers ever since. Its owner, International Audio Group, says the 770 had “the world’s first commercial polypropylene bass unit”; the 2022 release is more cautious, saying the polypropylene cone was “claimed to be unique in a consumer product at the time.” We give both as the company’s own claims.

According to the same release, the original 770 had a distinctive white front baffle and a thin-walled cabinet damped with bitumen pads, a technique associated with the BBC. Azima’s aim, the release says, was the midrange accuracy of a BBC-influenced speaker such as the Spendor BC1, with tighter bass, and its sound was tuned through many hours of listening tests with figures including the later Audiolab founders Philip Swift and Derek Scotland and the magazine editors Paul Benson of Hi-Fi Answers and John Atkinson of Hi-Fi News.

The 778, Cyrus and Verity.

Mission did not stop at loudspeakers. In 1983 it introduced the 778, a compact half-width integrated amplifier designed by Henry Azima, with 2×50 watts of MOSFET power for £240, StereoNET’s David Price wrote in 2020. “The little 778 spawned Mission’s new Cyrus range in 1984,” he added: the Cyrus One was a cost-cut 778 and the Cyrus Two an improved one, at about £125 and £250. Mission also made CD players and tuners, according to Radiomuseum.org.

Cyrus later went its own way. Price writes that Mission’s electronics division “was sold off in the early nineties”; other accounts link Cyrus to NXT plc before it became independent in 2004. Today Cyrus Audio describes itself as an independent British brand.

Mission became part of a wider group. By November 1995, when it bought Quad for between £2.3m and £2.7m according to varying sources, Verity Group owned Wharfedale, Mission, Fane Acoustics and Premier Drums, a news item on Ken Kessler’s website reported, with Farad Azima as chief executive. Ross Walker, son of Quad’s founder Peter Walker, was to stay on as managing director, and the item said Quad would be able to draw on Mission’s research and development department. In September 1997, English Wikipedia says, Verity sold off businesses to finance its development of flat-panel loudspeakers, and Quad and Wharfedale passed to International Audio Group. Azima went on to co-found NXT plc, according to Wikipedia.

British hi-fi electronics.

Much of Britain’s hi-fi electronics trade clusters in Cambridgeshire. Quad, founded in London by Peter Walker in 1936, moved to Huntingdon in 1941 after being bombed out during the war, English Wikipedia says. Meridian, founded in 1977 by Bob Stuart and Allen Boothroyd, is based in the town, and Cyrus says its research team has worked from its Huntingdon head office since 1984.

Several old British names now belong to one group. International Audio Group (IAG), a Chinese company based in Shenzhen, says it set up its UK arm in Huntingdon in September 1997 after acquiring Wharfedale, Quad, Leak, Ekco and Castle, then added Audiolab in 2004 and Mission in June 2005. It says its manufacturing is centralised at its own factory in Ji’an, in Jiangxi province.

Scotland’s Linn, founded in Glasgow by Ivor Tiefenbrun — in 1973, by the company’s timeline and the company register, though the opening line of English Wikipedia gives 1972 — says each system is built by hand at its factory at Waterfoot, outside the city.

Today, by their own accounts and the records we checked, Audiolab, Leak and Mission give IAG’s address on Glebe Road in Huntingdon; Cyrus, still based in Huntingdon, says it moved its manufacturing to SMS Electronics in Nottingham in 2019; Meridian, on Latham Road in Huntingdon, says its research, design and engineering have been led from Britain since 1977; and Roksan, founded in 1985, has belonged since November 2016 to Monitor Audio, of Rayleigh in Essex.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A white baffle, brought back.

When Mission itself joined International Audio Group (IAG) is less clear. Some accounts, including Radiomuseum.org, date IAG’s takeover of the loudspeaker business to the 1990s; IAG’s own website says its “involvement with the brand began in 2005 when production and engineering were moved to IAG’s state-of-the-art facilities in Shenzhen.” By 2011 What Hi-Fi? listed Mission among the brands “owned, designed and controlled” at IAG’s Shenzhen complex, which it said was founded and owned by the brothers Michael and Bernard Chang. The magazine described a factory of more than 1.5 million square feet that made most of its own parts, including speaker drivers, and said the designer Peter Comeau spent most of his time there.

Today Mission’s website gives its address as IAG House, 13/14 Glebe Road, Huntingdon. In March 2022 the company relaunched the 770, re-engineered by a team led by Peter Comeau, its director of acoustic design, who, the company says, was a young reviewer for Hi-Fi Answers when the original appeared and co-founded the speaker maker Heybrook in 1979. The new 770 keeps the white front baffle, with a 20cm polypropylene mid/bass driver, a 28mm microfibre dome tweeter and walnut or black veneers, and was priced at £3,500 a pair with stands. Its press release said that manufacturing of Mission speakers had moved to IAG’s factory in Asia “many years ago,” with design kept in Huntingdon, and that the new 770 was “not only designed and engineered in the UK; it is made here too,” in a 9,000-square-foot production area added to the Huntingdon building; we give that as the company’s account. In December 2022 Mission announced the 778X, a £549 integrated amplifier that StereoNET said looked back to the 1983 778 and that hi-fi+ headlined as the company’s first amplifier in almost 40 years.

For a design guide, Mission shows how a single early product can become a brand’s lasting reference point. Compare Wharfedale, a fellow IAG loudspeaker brand whose 1960s and 1970s Linton and Denton designs have also been revived, and LEAK. For this guide we use graphite, a baffle white and walnut with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mission’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.