Past meeting reports > Lecture, December 2008: An Interview with Bob Stuart of Meridian Audio
Conducted by Keith Howard
Bob Stuart has been a major figure in the British audio industry for over 30 years. Best known as Chairman and co-founder, with Allen Boothroyd, of what is today Meridian Audio Ltd, he has done much more than steer the company through challenging times to its current high-profile position manufacturing some of the most sophisticated audio equipment available. A pioneer of active and then DSP-equipped loudspeakers, he was quick to recognise the potential of CD and, as part of the ARA, to push for a version of DVD dedicated to high-resolution multichannel audio. Meridian’s own lossless compression algorithm, MLP, was developed in anticipation of this and selected by the DVD Forum for DVD-Audio in a technology shoot-out against stern competition. In expanded form it remains the basis of the Dolby TrueHD lossless compression scheme used in Blu-ray Disc. With a long-standing interest in psychoacoustics, which he studied alongside electronic engineering at Birmingham University, Bob is one of very few creators of high-quality audio equipment to have explored the fundamentals of sound perception and generated computer models of human hearing to help guide the design process. In recent years, in collaboration with Peter Craven, he has investigated the effects of digital anti-aliasing and reconstruction filters, one intriguing result being that Meridian’s latest flagship CD player – the 808.2 Signature Reference – uses minimum-phase rather than linear-phase output filtering.
These subjects and many others are covered in this interview, with Bob presenting supporting material to clarify the issues.
