Malcolm Steward: audio journalist

This interview first appeared in trade title, The BAJ in 2002.

Bob Stuart tells Malcolm Steward how an unwavering pursuit of excellence propelled a small British hi-fi company onto the world stage, helping corporate giants to shape the DVD format.

Malcolm Steward: You started Meridian 25 years ago, when hi-fi meant turntables, tuners and cassette decks: today you’re looking at encrypted digital video interfaces. Did you, in those early days, ever envisage things progressing as far as they have?

Bob Stuart: In truth, no: we simply set out to do a good job. However, our first product was an active loudspeaker – a rare beast in those days – so you could say that the seeds of our weirdness were planted early on. We’ve never been afraid of making unusual products.

MS: Other companies were making active speakers but your approach went beyond removing the passive crossover from the loudspeaker and replacing it with active electronics further up the chain. Were your ambitions already stretching beyond improving the sound into the realms of management and configurability?

JRS: We started solely with the intention of improving the perceived performance. The other elements provide terrific benefits but they’re not a reason for getting involved in active speakers: if making the loudspeaker active doesn’t improve its musical performance then it’s not worth doing just so that you can bolt a user interface onto it.

The fundamental reason for building active loudspeakers is that they offer opportunities that are outside the capabilities of passive designs: they can play louder; they’re more dynamic; you have much better control over the drive units; the active network allows you to alter the phase response in ways that you can’t in a passive crossover – you can match the drivers far better.

So to answer your first question, we didn’t say “Let’s start an audio company that’s visionary,” we simply believed that we had a better view of how to bring improved products to market. That belief opened the door for everything we’ve done since.

MS: When CD arrived did you glimpse a host of possibilities beyond the new medium itself?

JRS: Yes, but before I answer that question I’d like to say that one of the important things about Meridian, which many people perceive as a ‘digital company’, is that we have analogue roots. Our first products were unusual architecturally, but they were analogue. Our main precepts were good analogue engineering and good acoustical engineering… and psychoacoustics, to which I’ll return later.

In the process of making all our pre-digital products, though, we were driven crazy by the source – particularly the turntable, which is probably where you and I might start having a difference of opinion. It used to annoy me when I went to a three-day show that it was never until the afternoon of the second day that the turntable would settle down and start to sound as it should. The fact that turntable performance wasn’t consistent and dependable used to irritate me greatly because it meant that we couldn’t guarantee that customers were going to hear our amplifiers and speakers sounding as good as we knew they should.

When digital audio began to appear it was natural that we would be very interested. The first equipment with which we worked in earnest was the Sony F1 digital recording system – a portable Betamax VCR with a digital recording adaptor. We were keen to see what that and other digital equipment was capable of doing and to understand its problems – and there were many of those. When I saw what digital audio had the potential to do, and when CD came along as a mass-distributable format that was going to be consistent – and also had what I believed to be worthwhile though not perfect audio attributes – I realised immediately that this was not only going to help us but revitalise the market in general.

The great promise that digital audio demonstrated was one reason why we produced one of the first ‘sorted-out’ CD players. The fact that a piano recording on CD made the piano sound as though it was standing on the floor instead of floating an inch above it, which was the impression I always had listening to piano recordings on a turntable, convinced me.

A year after we introduced our CD player in 1983, we demonstrated a prototype digital loudspeaker fed straight from the digital output of the CD player. We showed it purely as a concept: we didn’t sell our first digital speaker until 1989. We had to wait for a suitable interface and CD was going through many changes – different mechanisms, converters, and chipsets. Around 1986 the SPDIF interface appeared and we were able to do the transport/DAC thing, which was, at that time, a way of extracting much higher performance from the CD player.

MS: In the early days of CD you were presumably dependent upon the building blocks you were given by Philips and Sony. You must have realised that there were limits to how far you could develop the medium without getting deeper into the technology.

JRS: Yes, and we went further inside the technology as time went on. There was never one ‘Eureka!’ moment: there were many. One couldn’t mess with the mechanism because that was a bit of a mystery – the basic proposition that CD could work was almost incredible – but we discovered many ways of improving its performance quite early on. We investigated every aspect of the way CD functioned. One of the problems we discovered was jitter. We also found that putting a second CD on top of the one you were playing made it sound better, which led us to realise how important the servo mechanism was in those primitive, early machines.

Naturally we also looked at the analogue engineering: the DA converters, for instance, were crying out for a high-end audiophile approach. It wasn’t difficult to make radical improvements by spending more money on the oscillators, improving the grounding and so on.

As we got to know the format we went deeper and deeper inside it. Our first player was heavily based on the Philips machine but that was just our way into CD. After that we started to engineer more and more of the player. We decided early on that we would never buy a player, stick a thick face-plate on it and charge lots of money for it. That’s not a good business model; neither is it the right way to make an honest product.

MS: Moving on 20 years, you now seem to be involved even more deeply in DVD – to the point of developing MLP (Meridian Lossless Packing), the compression technology that’s used in the discs themselves. You appear to enjoy immersing yourself in digital technology.

JRS: We do, but always with sympathy for the result. We were never digital engineers who thought that audio looked like a good place to apply what we knew. We come at things from a music and sound reproduction standpoint: we ask where digital can make it better. And there clearly are many areas where digital does make it better. That you can store information and transmit it through time and space without loss is extremely interesting to me.

We did, as you say, immerse ourselves in CD and digital audio. We put a lot of effort, for example, into learning how to program the software that plays back the disc because you can make a far better player if you can handle all the things that can go wrong in that process. If a disc is imperfect, dirty or finger-printed, you can significantly affect how well it will play through the software. When we produced the 200 series, we were the only company smaller than Philips and Matsushita that was writing navigator software for CD, which made us very unusual.

MS: As a matter of interest, how much work is involved in programming a player to spin a disc?

JRS: Back then, it took about a man-year to write all the software to play a CD. It’s hugely more complicated for DVD. We involved ourselves with it, though, because our vision was to do things our way and in a better way.

We naturally continued our work on speakers and by 1990 we had a DSP speaker – an active design with a digital input, DAC and DSP in it. Why? Not because it was digital but because you could make an even better crossover if you did it digitally. Whenever you process a signal in the analogue domain it’s vulnerable to distortion and noise if they’re introduced: and they always are and you can’t remove them. If you do things digitally – correctly with transparent processing, lots of bits and good dither – you can go on processing the signal knowing that it’s not going to degrade. That’s why we do things digitally: the other features that digital provides are secondary. As I said, some people call us a digital company but in truth we’re analogue thinkers using a digital tool-set to deliver the best results. We believe that the audio signal is so precious that it must be kept in the digital domain until the very last minute.

Taking an analogue signal and sending it through cables selected for their sound quality from the source to the pre-amp, and through more cables to the power amp, through more cables to speakers that distort and aren’t properly damped just seems a silly way to build a system compared with taking the bits off the disc and routing them digitally all the way to an active loudspeaker that can do a proper job with them. We might sometimes come across as anti-analogue but we’re not. We just know so much about analogue that we avoid it until the last minute. And then we do a cracking job with it. It’s analogue that you listen to: the audio in the air is analogue. It becomes digital between your ears and your brain but that’s a different issue.

MS: Okay then, if we’re being scientific, tell me how many bits it takes to make digital sound completely indistinguishable from analogue – preferably without getting into Quantum science and terms that I don’t understand or can’t even spell.

JRS: I can give you a highly accurate answer to that because we’ve done a lot of original research into how to perform transparent processing.

You have to start by using the right dither. You might expect digital to be all ‘steps’, but you can make it infinitely linear with infinite resolution. At that point the digital audio system has exactly the same properties as an analogue system except that it’s more robust. But both have a noise floor. So if you ask what I need to produce the same sound as an LP, the answer is a 12-bit digital system because the random noise in an LP is so high. The more interesting question, which I think is the one you want answering, is how many bits do you need to satisfy the human hearing system? The answer is 20 bits – provided you do it correctly and there are no mistakes. By that I mean that the AD converter is perfect; the processing is perfect; that no-one in the disc-making process makes an error – which is pretty rare; and that the whole player is correctly dithered. A ‘perfect’ 20-bit system would be completely transparent to the human listener because the errors that it introduces are completely below the thresholds that we can perceive. That’s one of the reasons that 24-bit is used because it affords you a useful amount of headroom.

Digital audio had its problems – bad filters, truncation, improper dithering – all of which led to the bright, glassy sound that many listeners disliked. If you do digital badly there’s no doubt that it sounds horrible. When it’s done properly though…

MS: Thankfully that seems to be behind us now and I’ve no intention of digging up the LP versus CD arguments even though I still love the sound of vinyl.

JRS: I think two of the really appealing facets of CD were its user interface and its dependability. Several of our peers would say, “But it never sounded as good as a good turntable.” Regardless of whether that’s true, the facts that it was so dependable and brought such rejuvenation to the industry – because people wanted to buy it and it made accessing music so simple – were powerful features that drove its success.

When CD arrived the music industry was in decline because people were fed up with us: they’d buy a precious record and it would get scratched and dirty; even if it didn’t, they would never it hear sounding as good as we did. I’m talking about the mass market because people like you and I who care about high performance make up about one per cent of the market. We always have to remember that we won’t have any music to play if the other 99 per cent stops buying records. There’s no such thing as an audiophile market that will sustain music.

MS: While we’re on that subject, how do your sales split between audiophiles and what, for want of a better term, I’d call real people? Are you reaching into homes where you would not have twenty years ago?

JRS: Although the audiophile market is still there it has declined – probably because there weren’t as many hobbies that you could get excited about then as there are today. While we still have hobbyists buying our equipment, we increasingly find that people buy our systems now purely because they’re entertainment systems that they have learnt or been told are high quality.

What has radically changed our business are CD, which took it one step away from the tweaky hobbyist, and home cinema and surround sound, which represent a change from the lone – usually male – enthusiast to the whole family making the purchase. More and more of our customers want to buy a home entertainment ‘experience’. These people have no interest in playing with speaker cables or painting green ink on their discs: they’re just interested in hearing a system that works.

We still have enthusiast customers – there’s even a Meridian fan club – but what you call ‘real’ people now form a large percentage of our user base.

MS: So there are now plenty of Meridian system owners who wouldn’t know the difference between a DAC, a DSP and a direct debit.

JRS: We have many customers who have bought our systems because the speakers look good, sound wonderful and don’t need hose-pipe-sized cables with large rectangular blocks at each end to get the music to them. I find that really satisfying.

One of the most satisfying things is when a customer gets in touch to say they’ve bought a Meridian system because it sounded the most realistic. It’s an incredible buzz when someone tells you that their wife is a violinist and when she heard violin music on our speakers she instantly said, “These are the speakers to buy.” That’s so much better than someone buying your products because they use a particular kind of DAC. The ‘ordinary’ customer has bought our equipment because it did what we wanted, which was put a realistic recreation of sound into their room.

MS: Has this shift been influenced by your advertising, which has never adopted the macho “It’s got 800 Watts, grab handles and a big volume knob” approach but has instead placed unquestionably attractive products in a desirable room-set, making the system look almost like an integral part of the furnishing?

JRS: One of the founding tenets of Meridian, which I started with Allen Boothroyd, who is an industrial designer, was that audio equipment didn’t have to be macho and ugly to be good: the components shouldn’t be any larger than they needed to be and they shouldn’t do violence to the room. That’s always been a very important part of the company ethos – how the product looks: along with good industrial design; being discreet and simple; and having an acceptable user-interface. We believe that’s what people want. We don’t tell them about things like power. We take an almost Rolls-Royce approach: do buyers really need to know about it? We don’t always specify it because it’s a distraction.

MS: Did that not pose problems when you started selling in America?

JRS: Yes it did. There were a few enlightened people who appreciated that our ‘tiny’ amplifiers were rather good but our success in America has been built mainly on CD playback and digital speakers, which buyers have liked and understood, and home theatre, which represents 80 to 90 per cent of our business there. The traditional two-channel business is minute. There’s a new buying paradigm today. Why would anyone buy a two-channel system now?

MS: I was fascinated when you told me that people buy your systems for movie sound and then ‘discover’ music with them.

JRS: That is the greatest buzz of all. The Digital Theatre is our stealth system. Meridian has always been about listening to music. Music is our bedrock. When we first got into surround sound, in 1994 with the 565 processor, we naturally fitted it with Dolby Pro Logic but we also put in other modes such as Ambisonics and TriField – and the latter clearly demonstrates to me that stereo works better with three speakers than it does with two. The fact that we’ve put so much effort into the music side of the decoders comes from our belief that you can play music so much better with more speakers, provided you do it properly. Stereo has always been a compromise.

Our systems do a first-class job of movie playback. We’ve always tried to be at the leading edge of home theatre: we were the first company to make an all-digital surround processor; the first to do Dolby Digital; the first to demonstrate DTS in a digital processor; the first to have MPEG audio. We put together home theatre systems and sell them as home theatre systems but the big thrill for me is when a family buys one of our systems to play movies and then calls us to say that not only do they love the way it works for home cinema but that they’ve also discovered that it does wonders with music and that they now spend more than half their time just listening to music. That is immensely satisfying – not only because it means that we’ve done something for that family, which we enjoy doing, but also because it proves that our ideas and initial approach were right.

If you take the opposite approach and design a system to play back movies, what do you use to test it – dinosaurs and explosions? They’re unreal sources: there’s nothing about movie sound that’s real. So, in a sense – although THX would doubtless disagree with this view – there is no ‘correct’ way to play back movie sound: there are just ‘different’ ways. You can’t say that about a flute or violin, so I’ve always taken the view that the most important thing a loudspeaker has to do is to reproduce accurately what we call believable sounds – the sound of instruments playing in a room, which could have been the one you’re listening in.

For example, in the room we’re in now we could have a folk group, a string quartet, or a soloist playing: we couldn’t have Pink Floyd or a church organ. So there’s believable music and various levels of abstraction. I’ve always believed in making systems that get the believable sounds absolutely right. Movie sound is just one kind of abstraction to me: it’s no different to the Last Night of the Proms, say, which could not happen in this room. By making speakers that recreate believable sounds, however, you’ve immediately dealt with response, coloration, imaging, dynamics, depth, and the space between the notes – all the aspects that matter regardless of what the source is.

MS: Meridian is one of a number of small, British specialist producers of high quality audio and AV equipment. However, it clearly stands out from the crowd for having developed the lossless packing technology used in DVD production and for sitting alongside Japanese majors as part of the DVD forum. How did it achieve that?

JRS: We tend to think a little outside the normal stereo manufacturer’s ‘slot’. That’s partly because we have a genuine passion for sound and doing it better, and for understanding the things that lie underneath that process. Psychoacoustics, for example, is a major interest for me and others in the company: it was one of my specialities at university. We’ve probably done more reading in that area than most audio companies. Appreciating how we hear things is directly applicable to designing better music reproduction equipment. There have always been relationships between Meridian and people working in these related areas, such as Michael Gurzen, Peter Craven, and Chris Travis – people who are interested in this area with overlap into the Audio Engineering Society. In those arenas you come across companies such as Dolby – and we’ve had relationships with the people at Dolby for years, long before MLP. The fact that we’re clear that digital is probably the best way to deliver audio – I should qualify that by saying PCM is the best way to deliver audio – meant that we’ve always been looking ahead.

I was gripped by the idea of what was possible with 4.7GB as soon as it became clear that DVD was going to happen. We had, I think, done a tremendous job of making CD better but certainly by 1990 we fully understood that we needed 20 bits, which wouldn’t fit onto CD. We had wonderful times doing noise-shapers – and there were some lovely recordings made by Tony Faulkner and others who were using noise-shaping to try to get 20-bit resolution onto CD – but we could see clearly that there was room for enough data on DVD to solve the two remaining problems. One was to have the dynamic range – which means to get the noise down, if you like – and the other was providing three dimensions. The fact that there was room for more channels meant that we could step away from audio being a spectator experience, where you’re standing at the door listening as you do with stereo, to being in there with it.

In 1994, a group of us – including Malcolm Hawkesford from Essex University, Tony Griffiths from Decca, Michael Gurzen, David Mears from the BBC, and me – wrote the ARA (Acoustic Renaissance for Audio) proposal to Sony, Philips and the Japanese, which basically said, “We’ve got a great idea for putting audio on this new disc you have!” It was fantastically prescient because it said that what was needed was multi-channel; it should be capable of handling hierarchical formats (where you’re sending a description of the location of the sound as well as speaker feeds); 24/96; it would be ideal if it were hybrid; and it should use lossless compression – even though no such thing existed – because we’d proven mathematically that there wasn’t enough room on the 4.7GB disc to do all of the things we wanted.

We sent the proposal off and there was, as you’d expect, a crashing, resounding silence. Of course, we had absolutely no idea how this stuff worked but undeterred we pushed and eventually got together with pro-active members in other countries, particularly Japan, who believed in what we were saying. Eventually, in October 1995, we were invited to Japan to present our ideas, our prescription for a disc.

We did a surround sound demonstration in the big listening room at Pioneer to a number of people including Dr Yamamoto, the guy at Pioneer who started the high-rate DAT thing moving, and we said, “This is the way it has to be done.” Subsequently some work was done in Japan but not much really happened. The ADA (Advanced Digital Audio) conference was working on what audio coding to use on the disc and was discussing whether they were going to use one-bit coding, PCM, or MASH. Everyone agreed that PCM was the best and eventually, maybe a year-and-a-half later, WG4 (the audio Working Group of the DVD Forum,) was founded. By this time DVD-Video was pretty well sorted and was starting to come out. To cut a long story short, the audio group finished up with almost exactly the specification we’d suggested initially, but the route it had taken to decide that was quite torturous.

The reason we developed MLP was that in doing the proposal we obviously couldn’t insist on lossless compression without knowing that it would work. Some of the people here, particularly Michael Gurzen and Peter Craven who have always been associates of Meridian and colleagues of mine since university, had worked out how it could be done: we’d already filed a patent for MLP when we delivered the ARA proposal.

MS: Wasn’t this all a little risky?

JRS: Yes. There was a risk involved. It could have gone nowhere but we would, if nothing else, have come out knowing a lot more about audio processing.

We showed the Forum MLP but the requirement for lossless compression didn’t become concrete until the music industry insisted upon it. That’s the way these things often work. We were involved in WG4 but that consisted of a number of companies with a number of different objectives: and hardware companies don’t want added complexity unless they’re told they need it.

Fortunately for us the music industry insisted upon lossless compression because it wanted 24/96, all channels, non-stop for 74 minutes. So the Forum called for submissions for a suitable technology. The fascinating thing was that no-one else had worked on it. We found ourselves in a ‘competition’ with three companies who thought they could develop a system and put together some kind of prototype. We, however, turned up with a working box that we could demonstrate. There were cries of “That’s unfair; no-one’s had time to work on this,” but we said, “That’s unfortunate but here’s a working solution.”

Meridian has always had a good relationship with Dolby and we agreed that if MLP was accepted we would need them to help us complete the project – to give it credibility. No global concern would buy technology from a tiny tweak company in Huntingdon, although many have subsequently come here to see who we are and what we’re doing. There was a lot of detail, a lot of politics – you could write a book about it if you had nothing better to do – but MLP was adopted for DVD-Audio, and subsequently in DVD-Recordable. It looks as though it will also be used in other future formats, which is very exciting.

Although this was a commercial venture, in a sense the ARA and MLP were also our contribution to the industry. This industry has given us a great deal and we wanted to put something back into it: the biggest thing we could do was to ensure that the next music format would be as good as it could be.

MLP has been so enriching for us in the sense that we’ve stopped being Meridian, the little hi-fi company in the corner, and have been propelled onto the world stage. It’s fascinating going to meetings for the DVD Forum, the Blue Laser Group, the Red Laser Group, and so on, and sitting at a table holding a vote that carries the same weight as Matsushita’s, Sony’s, and Pioneer’s. Every company’s vote is treated equally, which is a great way to do it. If the votes were based on turnover it wouldn’t be worth my while turning up. The fact that a company such as Meridian can exert such an influence on the way things develop – or even be at those meetings – is fascinating. It has changed the perception of the company and has built incredible links for us with the music industry, for which I’m grateful because that helps us build better equipment.

MS: It is quite remarkable that a tiny hi-fi company from Huntingdon is now rubbing shoulders with global giants such as Matsushita.

JRS: Being a small company actually helped us to function in this paradigm. Whenever there was a decision to be made we could make it there and then. We didn’t need to spend three weeks climbing up a corporate ladder for approval.

Also, with MLP, we were fortunate in having a peerless technology to offer: we weren’t going in saying, ‘It’s a lossy system but it sounds better than the others.’ There was no argument: it’s not lossy and it’s bit accurate – what you put in comes back.

MS: One thing you haven’t done, unlike many high-end companies, is to produce lower-cost systems.

JRS: We do have what we regard as entry-level products.

MS: But they’re hardly pitched at what one accepts as entry-level prices: you don’t have a £500 DVD player, for example.

JRS: No we don’t. It would be dangerous for us to make a £500 product.

The worst place I could be would be trying to sell a product at the same price as Pioneer or Sony: they have a production machine that is so much more efficient than anything we could put together in this country. We couldn’t compete: we don’t have the infrastructure; we don’t have the skills; we don’t have the design base; and we don’t have the manufacturing base. We could have stuff made in China… but that doesn’t help the UK much, does it? We could design stuff and have it made by OEMs – turn ourselves into a marketing company… but why would we want to do that?

The best a British company could ever hope to do is to make cheap products, sell lots of them, and tread water. I think we offer better value to our customers long-term by staying around and making good things that they aspire to owning. We’re proud of the fact that our products are crafted and have attention to detail lavished upon them. We hope that the people who buy them will treasure them for those sorts of reasons.

One advantage of being in a high-end niche is that the market tends to be more stable. And, of course, we export to 52 countries, which helps to spread the risk. A major step we took nine years ago – almost a whacky step for a small company – was to set up our own distribution operation, Meridian America, in Atlanta. That, in effect, means we have two home markets. We’re doing a similar thing in France. By having more control over your markets – and by spreading the risk – you can stabilise your business. Although, as I’ve just said, because of the kind of products we’re dealing in, our market tends to be less volatile. In general, things go up and down less for us than they do for companies selling low-priced equipment or companies that, in my opinion, are selling high-end products offering less value.

The fact that we’re able to put together a whole home theatre has also helped us. We still have good quarters and bad quarters but the situation is nowhere near as volatile as it used to be in the days when we were only selling hi-fi to hobbyists and enthusiasts. Back then, one review could switch the perception of your product for three months and there was nothing you could do about it. We wouldn’t want to relive those days.

MS: I noticed that you have a well-stocked trophy cabinet but I guess that being positioned at the high-end means you’re not so dependent upon receiving awards and ‘best-buys’.

JRS: Until the late 1980s, reviews made a difference for us. When we had a good review for a product we’d immediately see the bump in the sales graph. These days that doesn’t happen for us because our sales come more from our reputation. People in our part of the market also take a more considered approach to their purchases. It’s nice to receive good reviews although we can get a rave review and it will make no difference to the business. Equally, a bad one – although I can’t remember the last time we had a bad review – makes no difference. We appreciate getting awards – you can mention them in your brochure and it adds to your credibility – but they don’t have an instant effect. I’d imagine that when a lawnmower manufacturer gets a recommendation in Which magazine, he really has to crank up production, but it’s not like that in our business.

MS: With technology becoming increasingly complex, I find many manufacturers expressing concern about the level of knowledge and understanding they find at retail level.

JRS: It’s impossible to generalise but, if you look at the kind of components retailers sell and their complexity, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone could know everything about all of them. For that reason I would not be judgemental. I know that in the more enlightened stores training is taken very seriously.

We provide training without which you cannot be a Meridian dealer. We regard it as vital that we teach salesman and installers – and our distributors – how to demonstrate, install and configure our equipment. With home theatre and custom installation, dealers have to understand the configuration aspect: it can make the difference between a terrific system and one that’s a complete pig’s breakfast.

Training places a huge load on the company but we’re obliged to take it very seriously because our systems are extremely sophisticated.

MS: When we met at CES you were showing a digital video interface that looked rather interesting. How has that progressed?

JRS: We will make digital video available very soon – within three months – through a copy-protected interface based on DVI. We showed two cards for our 800 DVD player at CES. One gives a DVI output, which provides full, high-resolution encrypted digital video at up to 1080p digital, with pixel-to-pixel rendering from the player to the display device – and that’s the highest quality way to move a picture, especially to a projector. The other was HDMI – High Definition Multimedia Interface – that is based on DVI technology but also carries the audio. That’s the one we’re really excited about because it’s fully copy-protected and it allows you to move not only the very high quality picture but also all the sound capability of DVD-Audio along one cable.

MS: Just how important is the copy-protection element?

JRS: It’s absolutely essential.

MS: What does it mean to me as an end-user?

JRS: Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything to the end-user as long as the display device understands what’s happening. The reason for copy-protection is that the quality of the picture that can come out of the player is so terrifyingly good that you have to restrict where it can go. It can go to a licensed display device but it can’t go to a recorder. Not that anyone makes a recorder with this kind of input but Hollywood is completely terrified by the quality that’s obtainable with DVD using advanced video processing and upscaling. It’s closer to film than TV: it’s not HD original but it’s outstandingly good. On the audio side, the music companies are rightly paranoid about digital audio ‘escaping’: they don’t want their assets being ripped-off so there has to be copy-protection on that link as well.

We believe that the HDMI interface is the one for which the industry has been waiting: it’s the new SPDIF. What’s good about it is that it’s very high quality and it’s not very expensive, which is important if you want to include it in a TV or a low-priced player. One of the competing standards, FireWire, is quite expensive to implement and, because it’s based on computer packet technology, I have a number of issues with it. To me, if you have data that’s travelling at a continuous speed it seems only logical to deliver it smoothly rather than send it in chunks and reassemble it at the far end. You need multiple layers of de-jittering on the picture and sound if you use packet delivery so I don’t regard it as ideal. Its main problem, though, is that it delivers a low quality picture: it’s lower bandwidth and all you can put on it is the MPEG compressed picture. That’s why I think that HDMI – which is less expensive, very simple to use, has the highest quality picture, and will carry up to eight channels of 192/24-bit audio, and control signals – is the more exciting connector. It’s also backed by some pretty important companies – Intel, IBM, Matsushita, Toshiba, Sony, Philips and JVC – so there’s a strong move in Japan to adopt it. HDMI also precludes seeing the same silliness on the video side that we’ve been trying do away with in audio – the pre-amp, power amp, passive crossover clutter: we’ve seen standard definition video going through DA conversion and being fed along analogue cables into a line-doubler, which turns the signal back into digital then back into analogue to send to the projector, which may or may not turn it digital again. That’s mindless when you can have a ‘straight line’ taking the signal from the player to the display device. As far as we’re concerned the same message applies to pictures and audio – higher quality, lower jitter, get the data.

MS: Could you say more about copy protection?

RJS: Basically you can’t work in the area of high resolution audio without understanding copy protection because the music industry is paranoid – and if you look at their statistics there is a lot of piracy.

MS: I presume you’re not talking about piracy in terms of making a copy of a CD you’ve purchased to use in your car CD changer?

RJS: I think they regard ‘illegal copying’ as your son making a copy of a CD you’ve bought and giving it to his friend. When the music industry talks about piracy it’s referring to industrial operations, ripping-off thousands of copies for resale. I think that they lose a lot of money on both fronts. You can see in the statistics the way sales of CDs have fallen and the sales of CD blanks have rocketed. There has to be some correlation.

MS: Maybe the rise in sales of blanks is attributable to the fact that every PC these days comes with a CD-writer. And falling sales in music CDs is surely explained in part by the music industry foisting ‘reality TV’ bands upon us.

RJS: I’m not saying that I completely agree with the music industry’s viewpoint. I certainly think they wouldn’t have so much of a problem if they were charging a rather more realistic price for CDs.

MS: I believe that the whole complexion of the music industry has changed and adversely affected its sales. When I was a teenager there was so much great music coming out that I could only afford to buy a small fraction of it. Nowadays one has to go in search of stuff that bears listening to more than a couple of times. We no longer have sufficient truly outstanding musicians, with the possible exception of bands such as the Prodigy: where are today’s Hendrix, Zappa, and Little Feat? I would argue that the shift from Beefheart to Boyzone and from Hendrix to Hear’Say doesn’t bode well for the record business.

RJS: You may well be right. However, if the music industry believes that piracy is the major problem and demands copy protection before it will release its masters – and when you have a DVD-Audio disc, you have the master disc – you have to comply.

MS: Even so, pirates will still copy those discs.

RJS: There will always be pirates. They won’t be able to copy the digital data but we know they’ll be quite happy to take an analogue output from the player and make a low quality copy.

And from the musicians’ viewpoint, wouldn’t you be concerned if you were just about to release an album and tracks from it started to appear on the Internet for free download?

MS: I might be positive about it and regard it as a way to generate interest in the album.

RJS: And the small record labels agree with you: David Chesky said to me, “I should be so lucky that they want to steal my records!” But if you’re a multi-national with ‘assets’ like Madonna and Faith Hill, you worry about it.

I just respect their wishes. I don’t care. Encryption is bit-accurate. You go through the whole process, which is boring because of the legal agreements, and there’s a lot of engineering… To be fair, when Meridian built the first DVD-Audio player, as with all our players, we got the DVD bit working fine but it then took ages to get the CD bit right because CD’s a more fragile carrier. To get the CD perfect in the context of the DVD and vice versa… is boring and costly. And to do the decryption was a major engineering undertaking: it took my best people four months just to make it work. But we had to do it, not least because we’re in the unique position of making digital speakers: if we can’t bring a decrypted digital signal out of the player that becomes a little bothersome.

MS: That’s an interesting thought. If your system is doing the decryption for me, surely I could, as a pirate, just pick up that signal from inside the speaker and feed it to a recorder?

RJS: You would need, shall we say, ‘adequate’ skills to do that with a Meridian speaker. Once you’ve found the signal there are six channels within it to sort out and put in the right place. And anyone who has the required knowledge could go and buy a Panasonic player and get the decrypted signal from that far more cheaply.

MS: It seems then that the idea of encrypting the signal to curb commercial piracy is flawed.

RJS: Well, I don’t think I should describe the practical aspects of piracy in a printed interview but if somebody really wants to get at the content on an encrypted disc, they can. The point is that in doing so they’ve had to the break copy protection, which means they’ve deliberately stepped over a large barrier. The point of these copy protection obstacles is that they’re demonstrable in court within the legislation in America: cross one and you’ve shown intent so the copyright-owner can pursue you. It’s the same with the controversial idea of the watermark, which isn’t used on many discs: you can follow that mark through copied generations and prove that your material has been stolen.

I find it interesting that a lot of the press think that copy protection is an infringement of people’s rights – that it’s disgraceful to prevent buyers copying discs. However, try to publish a copy of a review from one of their magazines without asking permission and you’ll discover that they also have a very different view of copyright.

MS: I can understand why people would object to watermarking given that it can be audible.

RJS: If you want to put a watermark in audio it has to be in the form of something that’s added to it. You can’t watermark transparently so it’s reasonable for any audio purist to worry about such things. That’s why it’s called audible. It’s not called audible because you can hear it. Many tests have shown that it’s extremely hard to detect watermarks. It has to be under special circumstances and you have to know what you’re listening for to find it. It’s a very low level of distortion. I don’t worry about it for two reasons: one is that although we treat the music industry as ‘baddies’ – “Now look at what they’re doing. They’re putting a watermark in our content.” The answer to that is that it’s not our content. If the artist and the producer are happy with what they’ve done – if they like how it sounds and they’re comfortable with it – then, to me, that is the recording: that is what we have to deliver losslessly and playback. Although it’s a slightly pragmatic point, what the watermark does in terms of degradation is so much less than the ‘damage’ done in an average recording of a rock band, where you’ve gone multi-track, inserted equalisation, added echo, used compression. Those ‘errors’ are so much greater in a purist ‘crossed pair microphone recording’ way of thinking, that watermarking is almost irrelevant. The second point is that watermarking is really hard to hear: people who work with it say that they listen for hundreds of hours before they hear it. And it tends to appear in high-value music, which is usually the kind that hides it best: in other words, you’re going to be really hard-pressed to hear the watermark in Metallica. A Lithuanian pipe band recording might show it up more.

Ultimately, if the artist and producer sign-off the recording then that’s it. My job is to deliver that recording, not argue about whether it’s watermarked, worry about the microphone placement they’ve used or the quality of the studio AD converters: there’s a whole chain you can worry about endlessly if you’re of a mind to do so.

MS: Where do you stand on CDs that don’t conform to Red Book standards?

RJS: Making ‘broken’ CDs is something that we really dislike: producing non-compliant discs is a really bad idea. As I said earlier, CD is the most fragile of the five-inch discs: DVD has 10,000-times better error correction. If you do anything to a CD that makes it non-standard you are very likely to expose it to a playback glitch. Every time a new CD of this sort comes along we all adjust our players so it doesn’t buy the record companies much protection. Anyway, if you put most of these so-call copy-protected CDs into a computer, they’ll just copy. It doesn’t achieve much and I think the practice is dying out because the music industry, fortunately, has stopped using these whacky methods, which were only possible because the Sony/Philips patent ran out last year. We hate the practice because if there’s a problem with a disc – and it doesn’t happen very often with our players – the customer automatically blames us… especially, as is the way with these things, there are certain machines that don’t adhere to the Red Book standard that will still play the disc. It’s not a good scenario when a customer tells you that he can’t play a particular disc on his expensive Meridian player that plays perfectly on his friend’s much cheaper player or his portable CD.

What is good is that the music industry is now shifting its focus and is looking at how it can get out of CD, and is paying attention to higher resolution, encrypted formats such as DVD-Audio. DVD-Audio doesn’t have to be about surround sound, or pictures, or 96/24. The specification allows you to put CD quality audio on it – and lots of it. If you want to produce a talking book, for instance, you can have 25 hours on one layer using MLP. Of course, if you have visual assets you can include them, which is good because young buyers love them. They love pictures and menus: they don’t use them all the time but the fact that you can issue something like a Donald Fagen disc, where there’s not only his music but other information and an interview with him, or maybe a music video, is fantastic added value. The record business is realising that what it really needs to be doing is packaging the content in a secure medium and including added value material – and not charge any more for it. Giving people greater value for money is the real way to stop copying – make people feel that when they buy a disc they’re getting something valuable that they’ll want to keep and treasure. There’s more to selling music than just the audio.