The oscillator section was available as a separate instrument the 1400A. Once again Cambridge Audio used this system throughout the factory after which it was sold to Lecson, Quad and others and rapidly became the industry standard instrument. Indeed we ran an advertisement for the 1700A which read “Testing, testing, tested”. The 1000A was quickly followed by the model 1700A which was a state of the art audio measuring system which could read distortion (THD) down to 0.001% and whose auto-tuning was super-fast. We bought a load of these instruments to use in the factory and also became the UK distributors of the product line. The first product was the model 1000A FM Stereo Alignment Generator. A group of ex-HP engineers had got together to design some excellent equipment which was both accurate and quick and easy to use.
However there was a dramatic change around 1970 when Sound Technology appeared on the scene.
When used with the Radford LDO it could be usefully used to read down to about 0.01% distortion. When I moved to Cambridge Audio at the start of the 1970s I was introduced to the Hewlett Packard 334A which was a dramatic step forward because it had automatic tuning so having set the level the distortion figure could be read directly. The first dedicated audio test equipment I used professionally was the Radford low distortion oscillator and matching Distortion Measuring System in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s Sound Technology test equipment was the best you could get but somewhere along the line the company faded from the headlines.