One of Carlton Audio Visuals longest supplier relationships is with the distributor of Mission loudspeakers in Australia. We greatly value this English loudspeaker product and our relationship with its Australian distributor. Thus we were deeply chagrined to hear first through the ever present industry rumour mill and then by formal notification that the UK company holding the manufacturing rights to Mission - Symphonix Limited - has had an administrator appointed "to assist in stabilising the business".

Although this can mean the death knell of an esteemed brand it appears that it is actually a month long intermediary towards the contrived removal of Symphonix and the resell of the manufacturing company to a more benevolent entity.

As of today (3rd June)it appears that there are four contendors for the purchase of the manufacturing rights.Their final submissions will be in tommorrow. The new owners will be known by this Wednesday 8th June 2005.

An interesting aside to this issue is that the name Mission is actually not owned by the Symphonix Limited company but are in fact owned by the NXT corporation. This is the late 90's offshoot of Mission that developed the novel Flat Panel transducer technology used in the M-Cube speaker system and many other applications throughout the industry. This still has Farad Azima the original Mission Man as one of its directors and it turns out that the receivers were bought into Symphonix by NXT, presumably for being in default of their payment of license fees for use of the Mission name.

It is possible that NXT have contrived this situation to remove Symphonix from the company and replace them with a management team buyout that can run straight and true with the founders original direction. We would be entirely sympathetic to this move as Symphonix were noted for some excessive zeal and ambition smacking of naivety and shareholder speak that raised our hackles of cynicism somewhat.

This does not appear to be a Rover/BMW situation by the way but should be a well capitalised and structured change of corporate ownership to the ultimate benefit of Mission end consumers.

In the meantime there has still been excellent continuity of  supply of Mission speakers and we have been doing some excellent business with Elegante and the M-Cube. Do check out this new product on the website.

Regards

Rab Turner