Mission 707 loudspeaker

The Mission 707 was a best selling British loudspeaker produced by Mission Electronics, an audio company based in Huntingdon, United Kingdom, founded by Farad Azima in 1977. The 707 was a large bookshelf sized loudspeaker of a two-way design, featuring a woofer and tweeter in a reflex tuned cabinet.

Background

The Mission 707 derives from the award winning Mission 727. Both models are similarly sized and feature an inverted driver array (with the woofer mounted above the tweeter) in a reflex tuned cabinet. The 727 retailed in 1981 for £245 and contained high quality drive units which yielded a level of performance close to the flagship Mission 770 Mk I and II . A new range of Mission loudspeakers was introduced in 1982/3 featuring a de-engineered version of the 727 called the 707. The 707 was designed to compete in the highly competitive £200 price bracket. The 707 was designed with the needs of compact disc in mind:

"The arrival of digital compact disc sources and the continued improvement in conventional analogue recordings means that a wide dynamic range has become a major requirement for the modern hifi loudspeaker"

All 707's featured a white front baffle printed with 'Mission 707' in black,. The 707 cabinet came with cloth grills and was available in two finishes, black-ash and walnut. Speaker connectors were via high quality binding posts and single pillar Mission DM7 sand-filled stands were available as an option.

Design

The 707 features a number of innovative design components. The first is the use of an inverted driver array. "...first designed by Farad Azima in the Mission 700, [it] goes some way towards equalising the distance from the acoustic centres of the drive units to the ears of a normally seated listener. The effect of such a design is that at the crossover frequency the radiation lobe is directed up towards the listener rather than down to the floor" . The second feature is the baffle, which is not only unusually thick but constructed from injection moulded polypropylene with an elaborate pattern of reinforcing ribs moulded into the back. Into this is mounted a woofer featuring a doped pulp cone, a voice coil and a foam half-roll surround (which deteriorates markedly with age). This is built into a pressed steel chassis. The tweeter is Mission's proprietary polymer dome with a Mission branded face plate. The third and final design feature is the focus on two normally competing design goals: high efficiency and low frequency extension. Unusually, the woofer resonance (approx 88Hz) is somewhat higher than the reflex port resonance (approx 45Hz). Thus a light 'fast' woofer (with good efficiency) has been mated to a cabinet tuned for low frequency reproduction (with a novel multi-cellular reflex port).

Sound

This was a very popular loudspeaker with consumers, and sold widely. One reason noted in the hifi press at the time was that 'it offered a lot of box for the money' . Its warm-sounding character and high efficiency also worked well with budget hifi equipment. Overall, however, the Mission 707 did not receive particularly good reviews. Whilst "treble sounds were both well controlled and well articulated" and "very detailed and precise" the "lower mid was compromised by a slight boxy colouration that persisted with all types of music". In 1989 the 707 was superseded by the technically similar Mission 762, with a revised tweeter and dispensing with the multi-cellular reflex port. This model also was not well-received by the critics, but sold well.

See Also

• Mission Leading Edge Loudspeaker
• Mission 737 Renaissance
• Mission Freedom
• Mission Argonaut Loudspeaker