TAS 194: Meridian Audio's Bob Stuart Talks with Robert Harley

Note: The following interview was originally published in The Absolute Sound issue 194 in conjunction with Editor Robert Harley's review of the Meridian 808.2 Reference Signature CD player. To read that review in its entirety, click here.

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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.