Vintage

When the Compact Disc was first introduced, only the biggest of the big boys were able to get in on the ground floor with own-brand players – Sony and Philips leading the way. The technology was just too new, too exacting and too different for all but the largest of corporations to entertain. Even the likes of Denon and JVC had to buy in complete machines to re-package. Bang & Olufsen was one of the group of companies developing CD but it had played a minor role, providing testing facilities and trained listeners as part of the format's musical proof of concept. In practice it took until 1987 for B&O to produce an in-house CD player design, the Beogram CD5500.

The maturing design of amplifiers in the late 1970s created a problem for the marketing departments of large hi-fi manufacturers. Selling hi-fi was a technology-led process with new features and improved performance being the hooks upon which new sales were hung. But with solid-state circuitry, low-noise integrated circuits and complementary output stages already in place, the basic problems of amplification had been solved – so what was to be next?.

The basic design of the G.E.C. model is a conventional reflex-loaded speaker, but several important features are incorporated which materially improve its performance.

No, I don’t know what ‘Meracus’ means, and I stopped playing around with anagrams after I reached ‘rum case’. How about ‘US Cream’? No way: Meracus is so decidedly, unabashedly a German company that it couldn’t possibly apply. If you’ve ever studied a hi-fi magazine from the Fatherland or visited the Frankfurt or Berlin audio shows, you’ll know what I mean: staggering build quality, weird shapes, bold colours, lots of glass, wholly unique operational procedures. And the £4000 Meracus Imago is almost deliberately ‘unexportable’, because the customer has to be on some Teutonic wavelength to get to grips with it. Study the photos. You’ve never seen another CD transport like it, right?

In its hi-fi heyday, Philips was one of those audio brands that seemed to delight in being unconventional. Be it in styling or engineering, its products were usually distinctive, which delighted some but confused just as many. Neither is it necessarily an advantage when the equipment has to be combined with units from other brands to form a system. Philips receivers in the early 1970s, often made in the firm’s factories in Finland, were difficult to build a system around if you wanted to use anything other than Philips source components and loudspeakers.

Everyone loves celebrating a big birthday, and the hi-fi industry is no exception. That said, very few manufacturers make it to the big 100 and so, when they do, the results are usually quite special. At the time of writing [late-2025] we are days away from Bang & Olufsen’s centenary, and Luxman released a complete system earlier this year to celebrate a century in business.

Although we might conveniently ‘pigeonhole’ turntables into idler-drive, belt-drive and direct-drive types, there are subdivisions within each category. For example, idler wheels come in different orientations and might drive the outside, the inside or even the underside of the platter. Belt-drive decks can use DC, AC or induction motors and spin the platter through a flat, square or round belt, a nylon thread or even, in one example, a triangular belt!