Before the Dune Base 3.0, I owned both the Popcorn A100 and A110. The first thing I realized after the switch is how much better the SPDIF output of the Dune 3.0 is.

I am not familiar with the A200/C200. I chose the Dune 3.0 mainly for two reasons:
1. More mature firmware (situation december 2009)
2. Multichannel PCM output

For Meridian owners number 2 is a must. Whether you use a HD621 or not. That is the only way you get the new surround formats into your Meridian. The Popcorn will only do multichannel bitstream output.

As for the HD621/Dune 3.0 combo. The Dune 3.0 does not automatically bitstream DD as per standard Meridian HD621 setup, but is decodes everything to multichannel PCM. I did some A/B tests, but could not hear the difference.

Occassionaly I have an audio dropout. Strange thing is that this only occurs when the source is a DVD (watched a lot of Farscape lately). Cannot remember this has ever happened when Blu-Ray was a source. Another thing that happens is a brief pink flash whenever the HDMI handshake between the Dune and HD621 is done.

For the rest I am very pleased with the Dune 3.0 Everything I still want to watch I have on my NAS. All the rest I have stored on seperate hard drives, which I can slot into the Dune 3.0

All nicely indexed with cover art and information, using MyMovies. Very Sooloos like :-)


Last edited by Robbo; 2010-03-26 08:48.
G68J, HD621, ...