Cambridge Audio.

In 2003, Cambridge Audio made some of the best hi-fi engineering in Britain, first to market with genuine innovations going back to the 1968 P40 amplifier, the first amplifier ever to use a toroidal transformer. Almost nobody outside the audiophile world knew it. Where it was noticed at all, it was mistaken for a badge on a box in a cut-price shop.

At the top, Naim and Bang & Olufsen sold prestige, kit so expensive it was aspirational rather than owned. At the bottom, Bose and Sony sold convenience. Cambridge Audio had neither story: extraordinary engineering with no way to explain why it mattered.

If music had hands, it would be Cambridge Audio.

Not a lifestyle brand, not a prestige brand. The honest hands the artist's work passes through on its way to you: accessible, never cheap, getting out of the way so the music arrives as it was meant to.

The audiophiles who knew Cambridge Audio as a silver-boxed separate, and had strong opinions about it staying that way. The brand moved into headphones and streaming speakers anyway, from £100 to thousands. It went further than the range: the name changed too. Cambridge Audio became Cambridge, because audio was too small a word for what the brand had decided to be.

Sales grew and distribution expanded worldwide. The lifestyle range succeeded without costing the brand its core: Cambridge kept winning awards for the separates it was always known for, and started winning them for the new products too. Head office now has a stage. They put on gigs there. A company that puts a stage in its own building isn't performing a position. It's living one.