Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems G68ADV inards for the curious

Nicely built extremely modular. And a REAL fan !!

http://softronix.com/pictures/g68/

Bingo, Guilty of curiosity

Observ, G68 could be uppgradeable if M wants that (nice cardbased strategy)

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The New G68 Models has probable some never boards with combined functions.
To make room for the awaiting HDMI etc board

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Cool. It uses Altera FPGA chips (same as the Lumagen Radiance).

Mynb, I don't think the AXD and XXD G68s have combined function boards. Rather, they have a new board with one USB and one optical connector (which replaces the previous O1 and O2 optical board). The output boards have been changed to accomodate a different output configuration (balanced outputs). That's all I think - you can get quite a bit of information from MConfig.

A thing of beauty.

Looks like someone was busy at the mothership - Saturday date codes in the middle of July for PCB layout? That's the one with the JRS initials, too.

Those are CPLDs, VK. They're very similar to FPGA (and as you said, made by the same people) but smaller and with non-volatile storage. An FPGA can do more but needs an external flash (it's SRAM based, a CPLD has its own flash). Either way, that means that a certain amount of the hardware is upgradable without even changing the physical board.

I've said it before, but from a h/w perspective, this thing is as modular and upgradable as it gets. It's a PSU, backplane and multiple processing cards - just like professional kit should be.

On the face of it, this may be true. But there is some doubt as to whether functionality has been split between cards making it potentially uneconomical to upgrade. For instance, it has been questioned in the past whether the FM tuner could be updated to DAB. IIRC, it was said to be uneconomical due to the FM radio functionality being split across more than one card - you kind of hoped that it would have been a simple matter of swapping the FM card out for a DAB version.

Lets hope this is not the case otherwise it would have been quite short sighted knowing that HDMI for instance was a known entity before the G series was released.

Anyone care to try with a G91 DAB card?

Good point, Ian.

I don't think I'd miss a component video switcher card if I had an HDMI card to put in its place

Interesting that they are using what looks like PCI risers as their card connections.

This doesn't mean they're using the actual PCI interface to "glue" them together but I bet it is easier to get parts for PCI than it is for the older bus cards the 8xx uses. I thought it was VME, but I could be mistaken.

Cheers,