Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat No more Meridian HT for me

It is all in dedicated ht room.
I have system rails on the ceiling, can mount the acoustic tiles and speakers easy through the total room.

In the meanwhile i upgraded to a 8802A since the 7702 was/is not upgradable for DTS:X

Still do not regret the change i did. Lost a lot of money on the downgrade, or did write off a lot on the M system, but enjoyed that for years.

What M processor did you have?

What are the differences (if any) between your 8802A and 7702 to your old M processor with conventional 5.1 & 7.1 material?

I have recently moved on from a Merdian G61 plus Marantz multichannel power amplifier to the new Arcam AVR550. I don't have any ceiling speakers installed (yet) but instantly considered the change to be an improvement for both stereo and multichannel (7.1) listening. I do miss Trifield for some material. I haven't yet tried the Dirac room correction built into the Arcam (my sub is room-corrected already). I have an MS600 connected via analogue into the Arcam for Sooloos/Roon, so I am still in the M fold, plus I have a pair of DSP5200SL/MS200 in another room.

861v6 with 3x DSP5200, 2x DSP3100, 2x SW1600

I swapped the complete system, and there was a few months in between, as I sold in July and got the 7702 in November. So that was too long for a good comparison.

From my memory I would say the M setup sounded better on 2 channel via Trifield than anything on both Marantz units.
5.1 or 7.1 is more balanced now, but i have 7x Genelec G4 now, and the DSP3100 are bit different to the DSP5200.
But that difference is only noticable when you test with sound that pans around you. In movies I do not think it was noticeable

The height channels make the system sound much more open, though the DSU upsampler I did not try with music. So only for movies it is better for me.

I had Marantz 8802 and have 7702 Mk1.. sorry it is no contest for 7.1/5.1 if you had 861v6 or v8 especially for combined music+HT set up. I guess you get what you paid for

However the front height speakers make a perceptible difference for HT..cannot wait for "affordable" upgrade or trade-in to 861v9.

regards,
Kishore

The 8802A recently had the DTS:X upgrade to complement Atmos. The allows the use of the Neural:X algorithm which brings into play the height speakers (4 in my case) for standard DTS HD material. It’s very effective.

I don’t think the 8802A is too far behind the 861v8 for standard DTS HD material. When you bring in the height speakers via Neural:X, the 8802 completely wipes the floor with anything the 861 can do.

Thanks for your replies.

I get the impression that the average Japanese brand of processor/AVR has improved significantly in recent years with regards to the reproduction movie soundtracks.

In the era of Dolby Digital; there wasn’t any comparison between my 568.2MM and various Yamahas, Pioneers, Onkyo’s etc. that I listened to. With the advent of the lossless codecs; I think that gap has shrunk between M and the competition.

I have no doubt that with regard to two channel music reproduction; M processors still (and probably always will) have the upper hand.

It would be wonderful if M releases a product that supports the new object based codecs, but I guess with the launch of MQA, they already have their hands full.

Funny, when you wander the forum only on "half year" basis, what situation has changed for some hard core Meridian users around for so many years. In all I have wandered myself in the 5.1 world twice in my history book from a full digital DSP speaker 5.1 system back to an analogue speaker system. That was with 5x Philips DSS930 limited edition DSP speakers in the late 90ties and a Meridian 565 to an analogue system and ca. 10 years later back to 565/561 with 5x Genelec 8240 DSP monitors with GLM. All sold again a few years back. Overall the Genelecs were great, but for music bested by other fully hand crafted monitors. It really comes forth and back in waves. I felt after years of Marvel comics movies, Star Trek / Star Wars, quite CGI exhausted. So much junk in the theatres nowadays. Music came back to me, exploring the art better than I ever could before with new hardware. It will be interesting to see, if in a couple of years, say 2 or 3, people that shifted to HT (above 5.1) will come/fall back to music.

I always wonder when I read moves like in case of Jaco, how people feel that have stereo for endless years, two active analogue speakers e.g. like Backes and Müller, a pre-amp and a turntable, maybe a CD player. Somehow I envy those that have such stable systems