Integrated Amplifiers

My first meeting with Cable Talk, as the company then was, came decades ago in the basement of a hi-fi shop in Woking, Surrey. I was collecting some speaker cable for review, and there was founder Kevin Edwards making up said cables at a bench. By the time of my next visit, the company was in much larger premises, with huge drums of cable waiting to be cut and made up, the result of the success of Cable Talk's interconnects and speaker cables as cost-effective upgrades. The move from cables to full-sized hi-fi electronics in the late '90s was a bold one, carried off under the auspices of spin-off brand Talk Electronics. Several iterations of the Hurricane preamp and Tornado power amps [HFN Dec '98], together with the Thunder CD player [HFN Aug '98], maintained Talk Electronics for the next decade.

Edwards founded the company that now bears his name in 2009, starting with the MC1 phono stage [HFN Aug '09] before developing a range of turntables. Everything remains resolutely 'in-house', from the design and machining of components to the final assembly and manufacture of its turntables, the unipivot arm, the amplifiers and other electronics. The company remains a family concern, also supplying components to other hi-fi manufacturers as well as exporting to many countries. And all this is from an entirely British operation, located in Royal Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire.