The MCD launched in 1984, and didn’t just put Meridian on the global hi-fi map, it put Compact Disc on it too. We’d done quite a lot of work on digital before CD, so we spent a lot time making it sound right, and very quickly got into a zone where okay, there were clear differences between different digital sources.” When I examined Compact Disc I knew what it was capable of. Vinyl never sounded natural and it was never grounded. “Vinyl was disaster because the needle kept getting broken and the discs were scratchy, it never sounded right, especially when you got to the end of the groove.
“At that time we were lucky they were looking for a company with some credibility to give to CD, because when it first came out, there was a lot of gnashing of teeth, particularly among turntable manufacturers, as you can imagine.” What Bob liked about CD was that it was consistent. “Actually, we worked closely with Philips”, says Bob. “We thought we better get into this,” remembers Allen Boothroyd, “and we couldn’t afford to make our own laser arrangements so Bob Stuart took a Philips CD100 machine apart and decided which were the good bits and which weren’t.” The MCD was the very first British silver disc spinner, and conferred audiophile respectability on a format that most people knew relatively little about at the time.
However, what it really needed was an audio source, and the new-fangled Compact Disc fitted the bill perfectly. The technology was launched in Japan in autumn 1982, and reached the UK in spring 1983, and by this time Meridian was actively developing its first CD player. When they started Meridian, the M1 active loudspeaker was their audacious debut, and not long after the beautiful 100 series electronics followed…īy the early nineteen eighties, Meridian had a preamplifier, several power amplifiers and active loudspeakers to call its own, and was working on a futuristic component amplifier too – which became the MCA. Before its launch, founders Bob Stuart and Allen Boothroyd had already been involved in some of the most interesting hi-fi products to come out of the nineteen seventies – from the Lecson AC1/AP1 to the Orpheus. Ever since its inception back in 1977, Meridian has been a great innovating company.
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