Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Seeking guidance on building a Meridian system

I have a big problem with Meridian. The kit just sounds incredible.

At the moment, we - existing and potential owners - are completely in the dark regarding the company's direction. We don't know the future of our expensive 800-series investments. In the past (5-20 years ago), it was reasonable to assume that the 800-series would (a) receive purchaseable upgrades, (b) be the first in the Meridian lineup to receive new technologies/improvements, (c) be world leading.

Sadly, (a) appears not to be true at the moment, ditto (b), and (c) is patently not true in the case of the 861 (no current codecs) and 818/808 (no DAC upgrade with Ultra DAC technology, yet, plus limited to 176k/192k/DSD64 inputs).

IMO, you should *assume* that the 818 and 861 are dead end products. Never has it been more true to buy for what the product does now than for what it might.

Which brings me back to my first statement. Despite the current depressed used market values and my intuition that the 818v3 was basically a development vehicle for MQA, the 818v3 (and 808v6) is still a fabulous piece of kit. It's a great DAC (not the best, but still great), does an excellent job with CD, accepts 176/192k/DSD64 inputs (which isn't perfect, but is good enough for external up-sampling processing solutions), and is the only Meridian product which allows you to get >96k PCM into SE DSP speakers.

I share the concerns over the (complete) lack of insight into where Meridian is going with its high end products, but I use my 818v3 all-digitally with 7200SE speakers and its DACs with my STAX earspeakers. It sounds superb, I'm maxing out its value, and I intend to hang on to it!

Easy way to rip CDs is (a) not to stress it. Put a pile of discs next to whatever machines you are using. Every time you go by or are sat there doing something else, bang in another disc. You'll work through the pile surprisingly quickly. And then (b) do all the editing and tag tidying at the end as a bulk edit. Mp3tag is good for this. Best way to get consistency and avoid the Hiphop / Hip hop / Hip-Hop problem in downloaded tags.

My sons have ripped a fair few discs for HHers over the years. It doesn’t take long particularly when there are a few Control units around the house. In addition you can run multiple instances of dBpoweramp on a single Windows PC. With a series of cheap USB3.0 Bluray read/writers you can really max out the ripping speed of a collection.

What takes the longest time is ripping SACDs to ISOs.

Thanks, Mel Moon & Jdb-si.

Thanks, Ludwig.
If I am reading Duncan's info correctly, it looks like the 818 was introduced in January 2012 and first made available in February 2012.
Then the 818v2 was introduced/released in December 2012 and the 818v3 was introduced/released in January 2015.
So, ten months from 818 to 818v2 ... and then 25 months from 818v2 to 818v3. Disregarding the first 10-month interval, two years might be a typical interval between updates, although I'm looking at an extremely small sample size. The last update (to v3) was just about three years ago so it does appear that the 818 could be due for an update.

That ignores the upheaval that's happened at Meridian in the intervening period (departure of key personnel, spin-out of MQA Ltd., re-focus on custom install markets). Don't get me wrong: I would be among the first customers of a v4 upgrade and if it were to happen tomorrow, I'd be over the moon.

Ah ha, I did not realize that this thread had spilled over to Page 2, and I am just now seeing these replies by VirusKiller and MarkH, and the latest by dpstjp. Thanks, guys!