The Sonneteer story
The year was 1994 and it all began. Well sort of. Some years earlier, while studying Electronic Systems at University, Haider (one of the Sonneteer founders) had a band and Remo( the other Sonneteer founder) decided to get involved. Remo was fond of music and was a big HiFi enthusiast, but didn’t play an instrument. […]
Things were very much running on Adrenalin. We didn’t sleep much and worked a lot through the night trying to make sure things were just right with the new amplifier. We were given a chance to be at the Hi-Fi show at the Heathrow Ramada Hotel. HiFi News, who were big deal in those days,
We were starting to walk on our own two feet by now. The HiFi press had gotten a taste of us and we were exporting. The Campion had even reached the pages of the Strait Times in Singapore. The first Campions’ were made in a bed room in shared house. We were now in our
I [Haider] was sitting in our unit, a 3m x 4m sublet downstairs from our friends’ Satellite dish and set top box distribution business, not in great mood staring and sometimes fiddling with this new amp we were working on. It looked a lot like the Campion but the toroidal transformer was much larger and
Our own Vinyl revival started here. For the previous year we had spent some time dusting off our LP records and testing a bit of circuitry which we assumed was more likely to grace our own living spaces than become the What HiFi reference model for a few years to come. Vinyl sales, at the
The year a Sonneteer product became the marker to be measured by. What HiFi magazine in the UK, at the time the dominant audio publication, gave the Sedley a 5 star review. Ok that sort of thing happens all the time, several times a month in fact. More significantly was the fact that asked to
‘Freed from the century’ the Manic Street Preachers sang at the Millennium Stadium Cardiff and live to the world via TV as we sang with them (Haider and his troop were there) with little fear of the Y2K bug and lots of hope for the naughties to come. That year was the year we officially
Brontë was to be a range. So it started off as an Amplifier and CD player. That’s how it would stay till we finally put CD players to rest a decade and a half later. The Bronte CD player shared a lot with the more expensive Byron, but fundamentally the difference was the internal DAC
Digital amplifiers, up till this point were considered somewhat of a novelty. Not many knew that as plasma and LCD televisions were becoming popular, just about everyone of them included a Class T or Class D (commonly known as digital) amplifier inside. Apple were starting to use them in their computers, and we were already
Sound, CD quality, wirelessly. That’s what we offered back in 2003. The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is where the big and the bold electronics and technology companies go to show off what’s coming next at the start of January every year. We at Sonneteer have spent many a January queuing up at passport