Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Media player discussion (moved from 861v6 thread)

Of course, static disc images and the like do not require online hot backups as the data does not change except when adding to the library. So RAID is not necessary if an alternative reliable backup strategy is used. As well as the savings on not having to have expensive RAID kit, you get energy savings by not concurrently having to keep raid discs powered and the safety of having backups kept offline out of harms way of accidental or malicious harm.

Thanks for the good thoughts gentlemen.

I'm not totally sold on the idea of storing BR on hard drives but I would like to stream by DVDAs and other MC music. One question, does the Dune Prime GUI require a display connected or can one manage from the remote/front panel?

Cliff

All work and no play...

I'll try and answer some of the things discussed.

FLAC 5.1 24/96 verified into the HD621. The sound is fantastic!
FLAC 2ch into the HD621. Should compare well to the Oppo or other well made HDMI transport.

GUI for music playback, No it's nowhere near Sooloos in control and management of songs. Right now, think of it as a file directory of your music collection, nothing more. If you turn icons on you can have the coverart shown, BUT this is mostly a manual process, nothing is automated at this point.

What I find myself doing is to make a .m3u playlist of my favourites on my computer and play that playlist from the Dune. It's propably worse than squeezebox in this area. But squeezebox can't do FLAC 5.1 or Blu-Ray

Blu-Ray image quality should be near or comparable to the Oppo, one user could not see the difference. (I have not directly compared them so I can't comment).

As for NAS:
I would recommend a QNAP 459Pro/659 Pro if you're serious about getting audio and video stored centrally on a RAID5 and don't want to spend time managing your storage. If you need more storage just add another box when you need to.

Backing up your NAS is done mainly with a second NAS box from the same brand, check that it will do what you want before buying. This is a value add that the manufacturer might charge for or have included.

having a complete collection of rips online is no longer a realistic thought when you passed 1000 rips..

crion thanks to you I bit the bullet and bought a Dune Prime. I was assured that the noisy Bluray drive has been corrected now. I will also generate a MyMovies file and see how that works out.

Thanks

I hope it will work out for you, I've used the Dune platform for over a year now and if they fixed the noisy drive on Prime 3.0 that is good news. Prime 1.0 had a quiet Sony BD drive. But honestly I don't use the drive much as I use my PC for rip/storage.

crion: are you on mac or pc? mymovies is a bit funky on emulation.

I use a PC with win7. I haven't checked the other movie indexing apps since MyMovies was first on the platform.

Yes Win7 on Parallels works just fine. MyMovies are being compiled right now and there are some database inaccuracies so a little manual corrections will be necessary. But overall it is doing a fine job.

I have to thank Crion for mentioning the Dune BD Prime 3.0.
I didnt even know it existed!
I've been looking for a media player which could decode HD audio to PCM (DTS-HD MA etc), yet also decode FLAC 24/96 to PCM.

Cant wait to hear how it sounds on Bluray movies and FLAC audio with PCM on the HDMI output from the Dune, feeding into my HD621 and 861.

I've sold my Oppo BD-83 and Popcorn C-200, and bought the Dune. It arrives tomorrow. A disc player and media player all in one seems like the ultimate audio/video solution.

Next stage will be to get the power supply and digital board upgraded on the Dune. Maybe a superclock. I think there are several companies who upgrade stock players. Might try audiocom international, unless anyone knows of others?

Apodizing and buffering or upsampling is great, but it is of course important to get the highest quality digital input into the HD621/861 in the first place.
I realize an accurate clock and low noise/distortion power supply is crucial.
Once the digital information is lost in digital noise, jitter etc, there is no way of retrieving it. Or is that where apodizing comes in?

There has to be something not right plugging a �350 media player into �12K worth of Meridian digital processing :-)
Hence the reason i feel i need to upgrade the internals of the stock media player.

you do not need to muck about with upgrades. and the price of a media player is irrelevant to the stratospherically priced processor -- this price thing is the sickness of high-end. The 800 should spin a DVD much better than an Oppo, right? So the cheapo Oppo internals producing superior image and sound need to be upgraded in order to be more expensive?


The video image between the Theater+ the Oppo and the C200 and the Dune is excellent and essentially the same. The guts are cheap parts, all of them.