Music to Thorsten Loesch is a bitter-sweet love story. Before crafting a name for himself as one of the founders of acclaimed British luxury audio company Abbingdon Music Research (AMR), Loesch took refuge in the music industry in East Germany in the tumultuous 1980s out of necessity. The alternative would have been to go to jail.
'Imprisonment was the risk you took if you offended the government by making some constructive criticism,' said Loesch, who studied electronics related to industrial and military applications in East Germany.
However, his boisterous and rebellious spirit led him into trouble with the law and blocked from pursuing a career in his chosen field of study. Faced with the choice of going to jail for 'anti-social behaviour' - a charge arising from his being unemployed for six months - or taking a job with a small, privately run sound-mixing company, Loesch opted to take the job.
From this humble beginning, mixing sound for television and radio, he was drawn into an audio career; he took evening courses in sound-mixing technology and later got work with groups and musicians from all over the world as the Berlin Wall was torn down.
Yet the benefits from having chosen a career in sound mixing did not end there, for Loesch had developed a keen sense of cutting through what he called 'textbook standards' that do not reflect the reality - a quality that he says inspired the core values of AMR.
Loesch, who is now the director of technology for AMR, is the only one of the three business partners in the group that has any professional training or work experience in audio technology. His partners work in the information technology and finance sectors in Hong Kong and the UK.