Reinvigorating a national treasure
By Roy Gregory
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!
Jadis has been a pillar of high-end audio performance for 43-years. In that time, the products, the company, the design inspiration and aesthetic has remained a refreshingly constant presence in the ever-shifting audio landscape. The company’s first product, the JA80 has been reassuringly ever-present in the product line, along with most of the other, subsequent designs, while the look and sound of the products has been an instantly recognizable constant: the Jadis amplifiers are as visually as they are musically distinctive. That first, push-pull Class A amplifier, based around two pairs of KT88s per channel was designed and built by André Calmette in 1983. Today, his son, Jean Christophe Calmette is responsible for design and development. The company still relies on push-pull topology and tetrode tubes, it still builds hard-wired circuits into polished stainless-steel chassis and it still winds its own transformers, in-house. The same building it first inhabited. How’s that for continuity?
But, for all its rock-like constancy, there are also major changes afoot, chez Jadis. The company was recently acquired by new owner Jérémie Malfroot and the revolution is well and truly underway. There’s a long and distinctly chequered history of new blood taking over older, established audio enterprises, often amid a flurry of promises to hold true to the values and ethos of the storied founders. But here, the story is rather different and a whole lot more interesting.
With a 25-year history working for an Austrian conglomerate, specializing in synthetic rope and wire products, M. Malfroot decided that, if he didn’t change the direction of his career now, it was unlikely to change at all. With that realization, he resigned his post and started looking for an investment opportunity in Francophone Europe. He looked for a company with a solid culture and brand identity, but a company in which his skills and experience could make a real difference. He found it in Jadis – despite having no history with or personal interest in audio. But what might at first glance, look like a recipe for disaster is in fact, the complete opposite. This is a man who knows what he knows, and knows what he doesn’t know. With none of the views or pet prejudices that seem to burden most of the customers-turned-businessmen who increasingly inhabit the audio industry, he is free to take a long, hard look at the company structure, processes and practices, while leaving the audio aspects of the business firmly to the experts. He has already demonstrated a healthy disregard for and zero tolerance of the ego-driven BS and self-importance that afflicts so many actors in the audio industry.
He acquired the company in January and the evidence of the new broom is already apparent. Like many audio companies, the growth of Jadis was largely organic – and, in organisational terms, messy. The company was still doing things the way it always had, artisan production drawing over 90% of parts and hardware from within France and the EU. Which is fine in terms of audio performance, but still needs some serious organisation and structure when it comes to business efficiency, planning and process. Outwardly, the changes might be most visible in a fairly dramatic reboot of the company website, but there are far-reaching shifts internally too.
