The separate stereo amplifier market was starting to boom. It was monopolised by companies such as Armstrong and Leak and Japanese imports were also starting to make inroads. Leak’s and Armstrong’s amplifiers were very expensive. Teleton, a Japanese model, was cheaper, but still relatively expensive. I reckoned that if I could make an amplifier much lower in price than the Teleton, I’d be able to take a share of the market. 

I challenged George Chenchen [who repaired the transistor radios I sold] to come up with a circuit design for an amplifier. I said I would invest some of my money and set up a production line to make it. He told me he was okay on the electronics side of things, but had no idea about the mechanical stuff. This was not an issue for me – my Brooke House schooldays kicked in. I drew up a metal U-shaped chassis and designed a wooden cabinet for the chassis to slide into. 

I could spend hours talking about every single amplifier and product we ever made, and it would be dead boring to everyone other than the old saddo hacks who used to work for me or buy from me. For the broader audience, I’m going to skip quite a few things and just cover the interesting points. 

Chenchen was fed up scratching around, making the odd few shillings per radio repair, so he asked whether he could come and work for me. I agreed and put him on the payroll. Between Chenchen and myself, we designed this amplifier. 

It was impossible to start production at St John’s Street, so I acquired a factory floor in Great Sutton Street, just down the road from St John’s Street. The building was occupied by a garment manufacturer, but the first floor was vacant. It was approximately 1,000 sq ft, which looked massive when I saw it for the first time. 

We moved everything out of St John’s Street into Great Sutton Street. George bought a load of wood and made some assembly line benches, I recruited about twenty employees and we geared up for the production of this amplifier – the Amstrad 8000. I called it the 8000 as it was supposed to be eight watts per channel.  

Dad was starting to panic again. Until recently there had been just me and him plus a van driver, Harry Knight. Suddenly I had about twenty employees. 

‘How are you going to pay for all this, Alan? What are you doing?’ said my dad. 

‘Never mind, don’t you worry about it. Look over the road. . . You see there’s a bank?’ 

‘Yeah.’ 

‘Well, we’re going to rob it.’ 

These jokes went down like lead balloons with my father. He had no sense of humour and couldn’t grasp what I was up to. 

I took the first production sample of the Amstrad 8000 to Premier Radio in Tottenham Court Road. The shop was owned by Ronnie Marks, my first supplier. He told me there was no point showing it to him, as he wasn’t technical and wouldn’t be able to evaluate it, but his manager, Nick, knew about these things. 

I can’t recall the number of times I drove back and forth between Great Sutton Street and Tottenham Court Road with various samples of this amplifier, only for it to be repeatedly rejected by Nick because of its poor sound. Each time I told Chenchen why it was rejected, he would change a few components in the circuitry, and back I’d go again. This trial-and-error method of product design proved that Chenchen had as much knowledge about electronic theory as I do about butterfly collecting. 

Later, I would learn that producing the right sound from an amplifier is relatively easy if you follow basic electronic principles. The irony of it was that any amateur reading Practical Wireless could have worked out the problem. 

Eventually, we got the amplifier to a state that Nick felt was reasonable, and at that point we started the production line. I think that Premier Radio bought the first six amplifiers off me.  

With my plinth and cover business still subsidising the cash flow, I started to sell these amplifiers to all the electrical shops in Tottenham Court Road. At £17, the Amstrad 8000 was much cheaper than anything else on the market. And simply because of the price tag, they started to sell quite well. 

A lot of snobbery existed in the hi-fi industry at the time. The way you drummed up business was to advertise in the hi-fi magazines and try to obtain some editorial endorsement by way of technical reviews by the magazines’ experts. I placed my first slice of advertising in one of these magazines. Unfortunately, their review of the amplifier wasn’t great, and I spoke to the reviewers to find out why. In the end, I suggested the review should not be printed, but that I would still continue to pay for advertising. 

Talking to the reviewers was a learning curve. Never mind what the retailers said; it was the reviewers I needed to listen to. These guys dictated what was needed. I found out just what they did in their test procedures and what results they expected to see. 

I told Chenchen, ‘Basically our amplifier is crap. The long and short of it is that the circuitry’s rubbish – it doesn’t have enough guts in it to produce the sound quality required.’ 

It was too late to do anything about it. I’d bought over 2,000 kits of components for this unit and we needed to make them. It wasn’t that they didn’t work – they did – but let’s just say that if one were using it to listen to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the gentlemen playing the triangle and the double bass might as well have packed up and gone home, because the higher and lower frequencies were mostly absent. 

In spite of the problem with the Amstrad 8000, I was getting loads of orders, but the customer I really wanted to land was Comet, who had changed the face of retailing – they started discount warehousing. Most of their business was mail-order, though they did have a few warehouses in the north of England, so customers could turn up and buy in person. They took out full-page adverts in the hi-fi magazines and national newspapers, listing the names and prices of all the products they stocked. Customers would decide on which product they wanted, then simply look up Comet’s price and purchase it. This form of retailing signalled the demise of the small electrical shop on the street corner, which simply couldn’t compete.  

The hi-fi boom was aided by this method of retailing. Manufacturers would advertise in hi-fi magazines and reviewers would give their expert opinions. Based on these reviews, various products would be commended as good value. The manufacturers’ adverts would show the retail price – for example, a Leak amplifier at £40 – and Comet would list it at a discount, say £35. 

Their chief buyer, Gerry Mason, was nearly impossible to get hold of; he was being chased by every single supplier. I finally got Mason on the phone and tried to convince him that as our amplifier was so much cheaper than the others he was advertising, it would sell well and he should include it in his listings. After a lot of ducking and diving and about five phone calls, he agreed to a compromise: he wouldn’t place an order, but agreed to list it in his advertising to see if there was any demand. 

I pulled a bit of a stunt which, from a moral point of view, is not something one should be proud of, but business is business and it didn’t harm Comet in the end. I got Chenchen, Johnnie and a few others to send orders with cheques to Comet for Amstrad 8000 amplifiers. Consider, Comet had none of these in stock. When they received orders so quickly after the first advert, I banked on it sparking off a large order from them.  

I received a phone call from Gerry Mason’s assistant who wanted to order six amplifiers to fulfil her mail-order requirements. Now came the big gamble. 

‘Six?’ I said to the lady. ‘Are you joking or what? We are a manufacturer – we don’t mess about with six. You’re supposed to be Comet – the big discount warehouse company. We cannot ship you anything less than a hundred pieces.’ 

‘I’ll get back to you,’ she said. 

Half an hour later, she did get back to me. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘we’ll take a hundred pieces.’ 

This was another milestone in the Amstrad story – once we had got into Comet, things really started to happen.