Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Bob Stuart Profiled in The Independent

The following appeared in today's issue of The Independent:

"Bob Stuart: Britain's best-kept engineering secret

To the uninitiated, it is hard to believe that any hi-fi could cost �40,000 � let alone be worth it. But for Bob Stuart, the founder and chief engineer of Meridian Audio, the pursuit of the best possible sound reproduction has been a lifetime's work.

For this sceptic at least, he has achieved something rather extraordinary. Playing piano music, forexample, through Mr Stuart's CD player and speakers, you hear not only the notes, but also the pianist's fingers in the air over the keys. The orchestra is not in the room with you, you are in the orchestra. "We are building musical instruments," Mr Stuart says, eyes shining, more proud parent than businessman.

He is a slender, softly-spoken man, with a thoroughness that explores the tangents but never fails to get to the point. He is also disarmingly modest. "He's a legend in the audio world," a colleague tells me on my way out, "but you'd never know it if I didn't tell you." Mr Stuart's business is also an interesting phenomenon. Meridian Audio is a little-known success story of British manufacturing, an export-led paragon of the knowledge economy on the outskirts of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, which, by the end of next year, will have 12 shops, including in Kuwait City, Moscow and Bangalore. The company was born in 1977, the brainchild of Mr Stuart's engineering talents and the design skills of co-founder Alan Boothroyd. Since then, the pair have won a staggering 160 awards, with one early collaboration on permanent display at New York's Museum of Modern Art. But after three decades run by engineers, Meridian is now backed, via Reinet, a sister company of the luxury-goods group Richemont, which owns the likes of Cartier and Alfred Dunhill.

For Mr Stuart, his technical skills honed by a fascination with how we hear and process sound, the goal was always the music. "It all started for me with a love of music," he says. "I just wanted to make equipment that is nice to look at, easy to use and performs really well."

In pursuit of such a goal, Meridian produced the world's first "active" loudspeaker with built-in amp, and the UK's first CD player, now in its third generation. When the world went digital, Mr Stuart moved with it, not only building awesome movie-projector systems � one of which sells for an equally awesome �100,000 � but also pioneering a "loss-less" compression format which became the global standard for putting sound on DVDs and Blu-ray discs, and was subsequently sold to Dolby. The latest additions to the portfolio are an iPod dock and a touchscreen portal to access andorganise stored music.

If Meridian's achievements areimpressive on paper, the equipment in action blows your socks off. But the nature of the hi-fi market is such that, historically, Meridian was largely the preserve of the hobbyist elite. And, led by engineers focused on technical improvements rather than marketing strategies, there was no way to break out of the niche. The company didn't even have a marketing department. "We were a company built by engineers with sales based on the 'mousetrap theory'," Mr Stuart laughs. "If you put strong enough cheese in it, then someone will find it."

Meridian did well enough, particularly in economic boom times, exporting some 80 per cent of its output to more than 40 countries around the world. But it was no household name. The Richemont deal � brokered in 2007 by a Hollywood film-producer customer of Meridian's who saw the company's potential � has taken it into a whole new world. "We knew all about the technology but we didn't know how to communicate with the people who wanted to buy it," Mr Stuart says. "Richemont helped us learn how to sell high-value, luxury products to people who can afford to buy them."

The strategy is working. Sales have been growing at an annual rate of 10 per cent despite three years of restructuring and a recession that wiped 50 per cent off sales in the US, then the biggest market. The culture of the company has completely changed, Mr Stuart acknowledges, with a greater focus on customers and the distribution channel, and a product line pared back from 120 to just 35. But the biggest shift is geographical, with growth led by Asia and Eastern Europe. "The emerging markets are the places where a company like us, if we're smart, can make a great impact," Mr Stuart says. "We are a mature, respected brand which their aspirational consumers want to buy, and there is a more entrepreneurial spirit there, which helps."

Meridian is exactly the kind of business that the Government needs more of to rebalance the economy and boost Britain's long-ignored industrial base. After more than three decades in manufacturing, Mr Stuart is under no illusions. "The most important thing we can do is educate our children," he says, against the backdrop of the debate over tuition fees. A homegrown engineering graduate might still be hired over an American competitor, but both are in danger of being out-classed by rivals from the developing world, he says. "In these new markets we are seeing the difference the education system makes to the economy."

Apart from grudging acknowledgement of the R&D tax credit, Mr Stuart is dismissive of government assistance. "They have never done anything to help us," he says. "Even now they are doing nothing except talking in Westminster." If the government is serious, it should start with export-credit assistance to help companies finance overseas customers, and investment grants to help with equipment, he says.

Meanwhile, Meridian's 100-plus staff in the Huntingdon factory are getting on with the job in hand. Judging by what they are producing, Mr Stuart is not only an engineer, he is also an artist.

Sounds of success

* Bob Stuart set up Meridian Audio with Alan Boothroyd in 1977.

* As a child, he tinkered with electronics and went on to study electrical engineering and psychoacoustics.

* Meridian's first shop opened in Bangkok in November 2009. Another three � in Seoul, Mexico City and Santiago � have opened since, with five more due imminently. The first UK branch opens in Oxford next year.

* Products range from �1,000 for a pre-amp to �100,000 for a movie projector and speakers. The best-selling 808 CD player is �10,000, plus another �30,000 for DSP8000 speakers. Its biggest order was a �600,000 movie system for a Middle Eastern customer's boat."

Great article- thanks for sharing Frank. I've been arguing for a long time that Meridian really needs to setup its own stores and it looks like they are doing just that. Good for them. I think they are largely on the right track. That they will be in the new Land Rovers is a good thing. The new McLaren also looks terrific.

Yes, I'm really enjoying the system on the boat. I now need one for my new A380 personal airplane

The comment about target markets outside EU and USA is apposite. For example, B&O stores in the UK are closing at a rapid rate.

Loss of sales in the US of 50% in the past few years. Has that been typical of the industry as a whole stateside or particular to Meridian?

Good article. Wish we would hear from him more often. Even if indirectly, I'll take anything.

"...[hearing] the pianist's fingers in the air over the keys"? I'm a fan of Bob's CDP and speakers but that's extreme. Arthritic fingers?

Although I'm keen for Meridian to be succesful the stated strategy has a very B&O feel about it. At least M kit still sounds exceptional. I hope the pendulum doesn't swing so far that we see the triumph of marketing over engineering, of form over substance. I wonder how much real influence Bob still wields in matters like the product strategy. He who pays the piper...

That tickled me!!



That is the only thing that puts me off, not being able to speak direct with service etc.
At these sort of prices you need to know you can speak direct and not play Chinese whispers.

Good article though, I liked the bit that said.....

"Richemont helped us learn how to sell high-value, luxury products to people who can afford to buy them."


You can see where the new Meridian came from. As someone in business I have to say there always comes a time when you have to change direction and appeal to the next level of customer, some older customers will tag along, many will feel the company is now out of reach, but that is survival.
We have done the same with our clothes shops, albeit on a much smaller scale of course.

Thanks Frank The above mentioned from the article is what drew me forward in learning more about Bob. The Absolute Sound has an August 28, 2009 interview by Robert Harley with Meridian Audio�s Bob Stuart (page 1 of 5) shown below which I thought to be extremely informative and rather impressive:

J. Robert Stuart is a singular individual in high-end audio as well as in audio science. He brings to high-end product design the insight gained from a formal education in psychoacoustics along with decades of original research in that field. Concomitantly, his scientific work is informed by a high-end aesthetic that embraces the individual listening experience.

The titles of a few of his Audio Engineering Society papers reflect Stuart�s decades-long quest to correlate what we can measure with what we can hear: �Predicting the Audibility, Detectability, and Loudness of Errors in Audio Systems,� �Estimating the Significance of Errors in Audio Systems,� and �Implementation and Measurement with Respect to Human Auditory Capabilities� are just a few of his many published works. He was made a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society for the first two of those groundbreaking papers. No other person I�m aware of can move so comfortably between the often-conflicting worlds of the audiophile and the academic.

The result is the powerful fusion of the theoretical and the experiential exemplified by the products of Meridian Audio, the company Stuart co-founded in 1977. Among Meridian�s innovations are the first �audiophile� CD player in 1983 (a modified Philips machine), the first digital surround-sound processor, the development of the lossless coding algorithm adopted for DVD-Audio (now the basis of Dolby TrueHD), and the first active loudspeaker to use digital signal processing (DSP). Stuart has been at the forefront of improving CD sound, as well as advancing the cause of high-resolution digital audio.

Bob spoke to me by phone from Meridian�s factory in Cambridge, England, about his approach to audio design, the new 808.2 CD player, and the evolution of CD sound quality.

Robert Harley: You are the only high-end designer I know of who has a formal education in psychoacoustics, and who uses that field as a basis for product design. How has your work in psychoacoustics influenced Meridian products?

Bob Stuart: Oh, completely. Almost every design decision we make in relation to the sound is informed by knowledge about how we hear. Because it�s terribly important to know not only the value of each change you make but the way each component of the error the system makes is going to be interpreted.

What we�re trying to do with any system is not just to minimize the errors that it makes, but to understand how each error operates in the context of the others. You absolutely have to understand psychoacoustics if you�re going to come up with the value of the differences.

We�ve done lots of psychoacoustic modeling, studying it in order to determine where the most important areas are. We�re working with all sorts of things ranging from thresholds, to loudness, to how one thing sounds in the presence of another. We work with timing, distortion�how much you can get away with, how much you can�t get away with�and whether you�re creating an error that is spatially disconnected from the thing that caused it in the first place. All these are very important. So yes, I approach audio design fundamentally from the way we hear.

Robert: It seems like that would be a logical foundation for anyone designing audio equipment, but no one else seems to take that approach.

(Continued)
http://www.avguide.com/article/tas-194-meridian-audios-bob-stuart-talks-robert-harley

Great find. I remember reading this article. I do not think so long as Bob Stuart is involved Meridian will ever sacrifice sonics. They can do the marketing thing, but one thing every great company has in common is authenticity. What is Meridian? Above all else it must stand for the best possible sound quality.

I quite like this:

"We knew all about the technology but we didn't know how to communicate with the people who wanted to buy it," Mr Stuart says. "Richemont helped us learn how to sell high-value, luxury products to people who can afford to buy them."
The culture of the company has completely changed, Mr Stuart acknowledges, with a greater focus on customers and the distribution channel"

So when will we get the benefits of this improved communication and focus on customers?

The article was Bob in full marketing mode. Take it with a pinch of salt.