About MISSION 770
45 years of bel canto 770 creation of past and present lives
Creative History: Legend has it that Farad Azima, founder and CEO of Mission, once favored a british BBC classic listener from the sixties and seventies, so he wanted to improve it. Then came the legendary Mission770, a two-way speaker in classic mode in the late '70s designed to shake the world of hi-fi.
On the surface, the Mission 770 is nothing special. But what often surprises people is something outside the surface. At its core was an 8-inch polypropylene diaphragm woofer, which was originally used as a Chartwell design until I learned it was a unit specifically from SAYS Norway. The tweeter, also from SEAS, is a 25mm plastic dome. These pairs are then placed on a white front panel with a phase tube with a simple two-way flare at the bottom, and the cabinet is a sandwich structure with sandwich damping glue.
On July 7, 1977, Mission was born. Pictured here is Farad Azima founding MissionElectronic Ltd.
This is not the first time that polypropylene composites have been used for bass bowl materials, nor are they just particleboard fibreboard cabinets that use damping adhesive layers for sound quality damping. This was a completely revolutionary change, dudley Harwood filed a patent for polypropylene in 1976 for its use in speaker cassettes and produced a design based on it for the BBC, which Mission has insisted is the first use of this composite material in commercial/domestic loudspeakers. Similarly, Harwood et al. have been working on thin-walled damping shells for the BBC since the 1960s, and Mission once again applied this technique to the 770 cabinet.
Perhaps unique about the 770 is the effort it put into the design and the listening time it took; most speakers at the time were designed by engineers, soldering together components from a bunch of inductors and capacitors while balancing everything by taking measurements in an echo-free chamber, discerning differences in the design through extensive listening.
Mission Electronics is recognized as one of the leaders in acoustic engineering development
That's not to say that Farad Azima avoided the measurement method and stayed away from it. Instead, Farad pursued musical performance with a certain missionary zeal, and the magazine's editor offered his recent crossover adjustments. Measurements by BBC engineers in Kings Langley coincided with experiments on various cabinet structures, followed by late-night listening with Paul Benson, editor of Hi-Fi Answers, and John Atkinson of Hi-Fi News.
John Atkinson recalls...
“...... Night after night, I'll watch Farrard go back and forth on his Linn records, listening to what seems to be countless prototypes of the Mission 770, trying to match the midrange precision of the classic 'BBC Sound' classic BBC monitor, whose bass area is more relaxed and better suited to the special requirements of modern LP replay.
For the most part, he succeeded. I can remember almost a wonderful replica of Jackson Browne's live album Running in the Air, Emmylou Harris marveling at Ten-Cent Town's Quarter Moon, and Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing set us on for a blast until we were awakened by the first morning cry of London pigeons. ”
(Quoted with permission from John Atkinson of Stereophile Magazine).
In the mid-1970s, the scope of subjective judgment expanded, while the near-perfunctory passage of "listening" was added to the end of the previous extensive measurement and technical description determination, while Farard took full advantage of his connections in the editorial world. I was a contributor to Hi-Fi Answers at the time, so I witnessed some of the prototypes Farad bring to Paul Benson's apartment. In a number of other articles, Paul's revelatory commentary at HFA describes the musical magic of the 770, like the fresh air breathing through the loudspeakers.
But Farrad couldn't stop updating, and one reviewer complained about a seemingly endless series of updates. As Farrad admitted...
“...... Yes. All of this comes from a neurosis of living design. Because then I became very passionate. It's the only thing I designed myself! I am passionate about it and continue to improve it. ”
In 1978, Mission's Legendart 770 (part of the famous 700 series) was designed by Farard himself and co-designed by Philip Swift and Derek Scotland (founder of audiolab).
None of this stopped the 770 from becoming very popular. It quickly became Mission's best-selling speaker, which naturally led to the Mk2 and Mk3 revisions, as well as improved sensitivity and power tolerance. Since then, the design has eventually migrated to Freedom and other derivatives, but none of them have surpassed the market impact and accolades generated by the original 770.
The 700 Series, which can immediately identify style and performance, especially the 770, is still a hallmark of today's Mission design.
Legendary Rendition The new MISSION 770 returns to Made in the UK
For the "new" Mission 770, I was eager to revisit the Mk1's original design and hear again the great musical performances I witnessed in 1978. The key to the 770's remodeling was indeed the polypropylene sound basin and the resonant control cabinet, so this became the focus of the design of the new version.
Therefore, we developed a new polypropylene drive unit to mimic the extended response and low frequency characteristics of the original driver, while upgrading the magnetic circuit system to take into account the wider bandwidth and dynamic requirements of contemporary music. Of course, like the original drive unit, the drive unit is built on an 8-inch aluminum alloy basin frame that has a large rear "window" to reduce the early reflection of the diaphragm falling back from the basin. Special care was taken to connect the low-density rubber edges to the cone to match its impedance and reduce reflections from the edges of the cone.
The new polypropylene bowl has been treated to make it louder than the original, resulting in very strong and fast low frequencies that allow you to hear exactly how the bass instrument plays. By adjusting the cabinet and the reflective guide to very low frequencies, the "single low frequency" commonly found in many bass reflex systems can be avoided and balanced. In addition, the catheter has expansion ports at both the inlet and outlet to smooth airflow and eliminate distortion. The bass can extend strongly and cleanly below 30Hz inside the box, which is very rare for speakers of this size.
New MISSION 770 mahogany finish with special tripod
In the original 770 design, Farad Azima rightly focused its attention on midrange performance, which has always been the source of power for replicating hi-fi from vinyl records. For today's digital sources and advanced turntables (which are now considered as important for speakers at extreme frequencies as intermediate frequencies), Mission chose a lightweight shock-absorbing microfiber spherical dust cover with ultra-smooth response and a shock-absorbing rear chamber that pushes the basic resonance below the crossover zone. The quality of this 28mm treble dome is matched and combined perfectly with polypropylene bass/midrange to ensure uniform sound quality across the entire speaker range.
The original 770 divider used a single coil, capacitor, and resistor to balance and equalize the bass-to-midrange response as well as the crossover-to-treble unit. This will always be a compromise solution, as it is not easy to perform these two functions only with these components. This is the most likely reason farad Azima can't refuse to modify the divider and make a lot of changes.
Today, advanced crossover design software mapping and measurement techniques allow Mission engineers to accurately equalize bass/midrange balance and adjust the crossover to a tweeter by precisely defining the crossover slope. By using linkwitz-Riley's fourth-order acoustic slope, optimal acoustic performance can be achieved, enabling a seamless transition between bass and treble units, preserving all the exciting musical details and emotions.
Even so, the choice of equalizer and divider requires hundreds of hours of listening time and using a variety of music. We have tried nearly 150 circuit adjustments before the final divider is finalized. The circuit is then designed on the PCB using a very short signal path and accommodates high-quality components such as ultra-high-quality custom polypropylene capacitors and silicon-core and air-core stacked inductors. In addition to paying attention to the component layout, the position of the divider should also be away from the electromagnetic influence of the drive unit. Both ensure minimal interference and maximum transparency of musical details.
The drive unit and divider are mounted in a solid wood veneered cabinet with white laminates on the front panel, echoing the style that stood out in the 770s hi-fi market. In rich rose walnut or black veneer, there is another technological achievement. The original 770 reduced the mid-tone by using a BBC-influenced thin-walled cabinet that creates damping by mass loading with an asphalt pad, while the new 770 features a high-density MDF double-wall sandwich structure and multiple tests of the damping glue of selected Swedish special high-density plywood bonded particle board through a layer. This allows the cabinet's panel resonance to be much lower than audibility, allowing the drive unit to do its job at all frequencies regardless of the color of the cabinet. Provides greater dynamics and wider bandwidth adaptability to new era music.
The internal support increases the structural strength of the front loudspeaker and supports the driver to the cabinet, creating a mechanical support that facilitates the dynamics of the woofer and demonstrates the clear resolution of musical details. Finally, the internal damping layer of the fibers is specially selected and adjusted to absorb reflections from the inside of the cabinet without compromising bass quality.
The 770's brochure about "amazing bass definition and wider frequency response"; classic features; incredible stereoscopic imagery, excellent analytical power, and sensitive transient response, good depth and diffusion angles, sound accuracy and flat frequency response curves, good speed and dynamic range" are merely expressing the 770's true performance.
In fact, we'd rather focus on the incredible features of the 770 to reveal the true depth, emotion, and drama of any music you want to feed it.
45 years of technical accumulation, 45 years of Bel Canto perseverance, 45 years of market tempering, 45 years of classic witness, this after several revisions, after decades of professional experience british professional audio R & D engineers hundreds of times to adjust the new 45th anniversary edition Mission (BeL) 770, will be listed in the near future, we firmly believe that you will find the classic design fully reborn!
Attached: About Peter Comeau
Peter Comeau began working for MISSION UK in 1999 as Mission's Director of Acoustic Design. During his tenure, he has designed a number of awards – the 780 won the WhatHi-Fi Best Speaker Award in 2000 and 2001 for two consecutive years; the 782 won the Much-anticipated European Speaker EISA Award in 2001; and the Volare V63 won the European Speaker EISA Award in 2003. The MX-1 was named Five Star Of the Year by WhatHi-Fi. The 79 series and the SX series have won many international awards internationally.
Since IAG's acquisition of MISSION, Peter Comeau has joined IAG as Design Director, and models such as the Bel Canto LX-2 and QX-2 have also won heavyweight awards internationally.