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The Meridian Story

Allen Boothroyd and Bob Stuart met in Cambridge. They discovered shared interests and philosophies in audio equipment design, and founded Meridian in 1977 with a belief in good audio engineering, good acoustical engineering, and the value of psychoacoustics.

Meridian’s Bob Stuart studied Psychoacoustics, Electronic Engineering and Management at Imperial College, London. A passion for music soon led him to specialise in audio design.

Since then, their designs for Meridian Audio have gained much critical and industrial acclaim, winning the coveted Design Council Award for Outstanding British Product an unprecedented three times, in addition to the EISA European Product of the year award twice and many other international accolades.

Believing that they had a unique and unusual approach to improving the performance and efficiency of the traditional hi-fi system, the first product from Meridian was an active loudspeaker system that provided the foundation for much that has come since.

Then, following the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1984, Meridian produced the world’s first audiophile-quality CD player, at a time when other hi-fi manufacturers were suggesting that while ‘digital’ might be fine for test equipment, they wouldn’t let it into their audio systems.

Meridian stood strong in its belief in digital audio and released the world’s first digital surround processor. The company was then ideally placed to take advantage of the home theatre revolution: and today, Meridian is as highly regarded for its video as it is for its audio.

Allen Boothroyd trained as a mechanical engineer, going on to study industrial design at the Royal College of Art.

Bob’s passion for music has played a major role in his strong desire to ensure that the quality of an original recording remains unaltered for lossless retrieval. As a result, Meridian Lossless Packing or MLP technology was developed over a period of several years by the Meridian research team. In 1999 these efforts were rewarded when MLP was mandated by the world’s leading audio experts as the lossless compression scheme for the DVD-Audio standard – a significant achievement for any audio company.

Meridian is the only British manufacturer represented on the DVD Forum, and plays a full part in the development of this and future high-resolution systems.

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