We thought it would be a cool idea for readers to get to know the team here at HiFi PiG a little better. And with that in mind, we thought we’d introduce the latest member of the HiFi PiG team, Jon Lumb, who has a wide range of experience in home audio and is a well-known face on the UK HiFi scene. Anyway, enough from me, over to Jon to tell you a bit about his HiFi journey.

Hello, you lovely people. Stuart asked me to write a little bit about myself. I’m not normally a fan of doing this (it’s far too close to writing a covering letter for a job application, which is an activity I loathe), but it’s probably quite useful to have some idea of where I’m coming from when I write a review, so here we go!

I have a clear origin story of how I got into HiFi. I’d enjoyed listening to music on the radio from the age of about 10, but this was always just on basic equipment. My mum was a flautist who played most weeks in our local church. I’d actually forgotten this, but we did actually have a basic but proper hifi when I was small – an Akai receiver and some Tangent Monitor 3s (which are still going strong!) – but back in those days I had no idea what I was really listening to.

Aged about 14, I got roped into helping run the sound at the church. A lot of church sound is a car crash – it’s mostly very well-meaning people with minimal skills and even more minimal budgets. I was extremely fortunate that 2 of the guys involved really knew what they were doing – one had a degree in the subject, and one had run a professional outfit for a while doing live sound. So I got really well trained, not just on the technical side, but also how to listen properly to what was coming through the system. They had also ensured that there was s decent budget for equipment, and that it got wisely spent! One of the side effects of this was that I got a really ingrained feeling about when things didn’t sound right, it was my job to fix it. And that meant when listening on whatever mini system I had at home soon became something of a source of frustration, because frankly it sounded awful, but I was no longer able to just switch off and enjoy the music.

I spent my post-GCSE summer getting immensely hot and sweaty working for my Dad’s tree-surgery business. At the end of which, I had enough money to go to my local hifi shop (a little shout out to Acton Gate Audio of Wrexham here, who were fantastic and quite willing to give the proper time of day to a 16-year-old). It was in some ways a bit of a classic “What HiFi Award Winners” setup – Technics SLPG-390, Nad C320BEE, and the eponymous Quad 11Ls. What’s interesting (to me at least) is that despite a relatively “professional” starting point in hifi and sound, I don’t go for the sorts of setup that someone working in a studio tends to want, which is, of course, that completely flat frequency response, and warts and all presentation. I want my HiFi to make the music sound as good as possible, even if that means it’s not the last word in accuracy (don’t worry, I separate that preference when writing reviews!) I suspect it’s the live sound element that is part of it. When you’re engineering a live concert, you want it to sound as good as possible for the folks there, even if that’s not necessarily the last word in accuracy.

At some point, I fell down the rabbit hole of hifi forums. It started with the now-defunct Audiogain forum (no idea how I came across that one), before gravitating over to the Wam forums, where I spent a goodly few years as a moderator. The Wam also ran its own HiFishow, which was my first intro to these things.

So there we have it, a pocket history for you, and hopefully a little insight into the way I approach things.

You can read Jon’s first review for HiFi PiG here.

Jon Lumb