Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Brief HIstory of Lecson by Stan Curtis

Picked this up from the LP12 FB page. Brief History of Lecson by Stan Curtis It's on Google Groups. I loved the look of their pre/power amp system.
Given Lecson original team were Bob Stuart and Allen Boothroyd, does that mean Lecson is "non-Meridian" - discuss. Haha.(PS IMHO, non-Meridian is correct.)

Very interesting; Thanks.

I lusted after these for awhile. As is my wont...

Neil

Ah - Lecson - what stylish products.

I believe they won an award by the Design Council and are on display in a museum of Modern Art somewhere..might be V&A, London.

The pre-amp looked great, but internally it really was not very good - typical 70s UK pcb and layout. And the top panel sliders (controlling volume, input selection etc) had hardboard mountings on the underside, that had a small magnet that operated reed switches on the mainboard. So, servicing it, and getting it to work with the lid off, involved needing some spare magnets to be able to make it function.

It also used a multi-way DIN cable between pre- and power amps...with low level signals going to the power amp and high level signals coming back to the pre to make the headphone socket work.

The power amps also had a habit of overheating and of fans failing...and the shiny black plastic "tops" on the power amps used to become detached quite easily.

After Lecson went bust, Messrs Stuart and Boothroyd designed and produced the short-lived Orpheus range and the basis of that became the Meridian M1 speaker and with a very slimmed down pre-amp, namely the 101.

Sadly, Allen Boothroyd died recently, though I do not think it was from COVID-19.

Allen Boothroyd (wiki)

That a great find Mike, really interesting read.

Thanks

George

I have a (very) tenuous link to Stan Curtis in that I used to work at Amstrad (happy days) in the early '90s. We had an International Sales Director called Bernhard Steiner who was also a Director of Wharfedale. I think we used the small home cinema speakers from them for our SRD2000 which was a Dolby equipped 4 channel satellite TV receiver. Plus a sub. I remember the internal demos using The Terminator. Sounded quite good (obviously not in any hi-fi league but pretty good for a couple of hundred quid.