You don’t meet many people more passionate about their craft than Eric Kingdon. Having started working for Sony over 30 years ago - during the launch of the iconic Compact Disc, no less - Eric is now one of our bonafide audio specialists. He even works with our audio engineers here at Sony to fine-tune each product for the European market, and so we’ve dubbed him ‘The Ear of Europe’.
But, as we sit down for a coffee and a chat, Eric describes how he could’ve ended up pursuing a very different career path indeed.
Beginning the audio journey
"I actually went to university to read medicine, but after one year I changed my mind and ended up going for biochemistry. I came out, had a job lined up and was all set to go and work for a guy who was at the University of Norwich. Then, I don't know why I did it, but there was a place advertising for people to work in a new hi-fi store - I threw everything off and went to work there.” After a few years working there, he then ended up securing a job here at Sony as a technical product trainer.
But this wasn’t the beginning of his blossoming romance with audio. In fact, this wasn’t even the first hi-fi shop he’d worked in. "My aunt had a shop, and when I was a kid I remember hearing this sound. It sounded so far away from anything today...I said 'what's that!?'. So my aunt lifted up the counter and there was a HMV Stereomaster in the corner.” He has the same wide-eyed wonder that you can imagine on his face upon first hearing ‘that sound’ as a kid, his enthusiasm infectious.
“As daft as it sounds, they were actually quite forward-thinking speakers...you'd put it in the corner [of a room] and it'd use reflection off the walls to create a bigger sound image. It was playing a piece of classical music and it sounded fantastic, and then I started to think, 'I wonder how it'd sound if you put the speakers a bit farther apart. Why do they have to be in the box? Why can't they be separate to it?' And that was it. After that I was hooked."
Most people tend to build up their music collection before forking out on equipment to make it sound great, but Eric opted for the opposite approach. "I was a hi-fi enthusiast first, and then I was a music lover. All the money I used to get I'd spend on hi-fis, but I had a small record collection. One day I looked at my hi-fi and thought 'actually, I don't really listen to a lot of music, this is all out of balance!’"
The endurance of vinyl
We then talk about all aspects of music, from how he gets a kick out of the buzzing atmosphere of a live show (“it’s not mass hysteria, it’s mass emotion”), to the process of collecting and playing vinyl. It’s hard to ignore the huge boom in vinyl sales over the last few years, and although Eric listens to all sorts of audio formats, it seems as though he has a particular soft spot for vinyl.
“The love of the LP isn’t just because it’s a special type of sound, it’s also the process of picking it up, treasuring it, placing it on the [turntable] platter - it’s a ritual. Music is enormously important for a lot of reasons. It’s not just about saying ‘that’s a nice tune’, there’s a lot more to it than that.”
The Hi-Res revolution
Due to a combination of faster broadband and ever-increasing storage, listening habits have changed, with an overwhelming tendency to listen to lots of music very quickly rather than taking the time to properly enjoy a body of work. However, Eric thinks that High-Resolution Audio has the potential to get people appreciating and re-discovering the music they love.
“You can’t necessarily touch it, you can’t pick it up,” he says, “but when you see people listening to [Hi-Res music], the same expression is on their face as if they’ve gone through the ritual of preparation for it, and that’s down to quality.
“It's like the first time I drove a really nice Porsche. It was my friends' car, and to be honest I'm not really a Porsche fan, but I loved driving it - I could feel the road through the wheels and I felt at one with it. The point is that I'll never forget that first time, and that's what I think quality can do to music."
As you might expect for a man with such a deep audio obsession, his own setup at home is enviable. One of his most prized possessions is an extremely rare Sony Esprit system that took him years to get his hands on. “They were hand-made, and they were in such limited numbers that there were no boxes made for them - they just came in plain brown boxes with sticky labels. But that was a real out-of-the box experience. It was like, ‘my God, this has been made just for me’. As far as I know there are less than five of these systems in the country.”
Regardless of whether you’re a music fan or not, someone as passionate as Eric has the ability to make you interested in things you might never have had strong feelings for before, such as the energy efficiency of a certain hi-fi or obscure audio codecs for instance.
But most importantly of all, Eric is a music lover, pure and simple, and he sums it up eloquently as we wrap up our chat. “[Music] doesn’t know any cultural boundaries; it doesn’t know any geographical boundaries,” he says. “You could be talking to somebody from the other side of the world about it online and it’s like they’re next you - it’s universal.”
