Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk

Just got my transporter delivered and had a quick listen. Initial thoughts are that it produces a much cleaner sound than that from my SB3. Dialogue is very distinct and much more CD like (as much as I remember CD's!) Early days yet and I suppose a bit of 'burning in' won't go amiss, but what I can say is that music on Spotify is substantially improved, probably less so on my FLAC ripped CD's

Rod

I had my first play with my Transporter last night.

First impressions were good in that it looks great and is well built. The electro-mechanical rotary selector knob is an engineering tour de force; a real shame that I will hardly ever use it! The displays are excellent, but no surprise given they are identical those on the SB3.

It was easy enough to swap out the Squeezbox v1 (!!!) that I was temporarily using in my main system. The audio path is Transporter to Radiance (coax) to HD621 (HDMI) to G68 (SmartLink) to 5x DSP33s and stereo REL Strata III subs.

I encountered an immediate problem where the Radiance wouldn't produce a stable output over HDMI with a blank component video input (where it previously had). I have very recently updated the Radiance firmware and also turned off the video to HDMI output #2 (so the HD621 is now fed audio on a 1080i blank video carrier). Either could have caused the problem; I solved it though by configuring Radiance source 6 to use the HDMI input from my SkyHD (this works with the SkyHD in standby).

Oddly, my G68 was showing Music2 88K *PCM* from the HD621, not MHR. This is slightly concerning and I need to check my HD621 settings. However, it could be that the HD621 is failing to apply MHR if there is no HDCP from the Radiance. This could be either a Radiance bug, a HD621 bug, or a bug or correct behaviour in both!

My system has undergone a lot of change recently and I've not had an extended listening session since I re-configured my G68 with the +3dB tweak (which put right an incredible 7dB of digital compression), so I can't say that the Transporter is better than the SB1, the SB3 or the Touch; however, the system that I listened to last night has the highest levels of detail and realism that my system has ever produced. From Tracy Chapman to Lou Reed to Duffy to David Gray to the Eagles to Chris Rea to the acoustic folk of Gerry O'Connor and Clive Carroll, the separation of the different layers of music is very very good. And I have not optimized the system yet.

Can you remind us what your other sources are? Oppo and legacy HDDVD into HD621?

What do you suppose the reasons for the superiority of your streaming set up are? Better jitter performance than the Oppo?

But of course you know it can't sound Better, Right?? .................. ...

Yeah right! All I'm saying is that I've been making incremental tweaks, not doing a massive amount of listening (as the room is currently a mess), but the overall results are good.

Incidentally, I just discovered SoX - Squeezebox Server based upsampling. Naturally, I'd prefer Meridian upsampling, but *interestingly*, one of the options is a minimum phase upsampling filter...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoX
http://sox.sourceforge.net/
http://sox.sourceforge.net/SoX/Resampling

All these wonderful filters to choose from. -vMa looks interesting.

Lots of Transporter discussion moved from Restaurant thread.

How many MIPS does it take to upsample with SOX?

What are you using for a server?

I had not kept up on how powerful SOX appears to be.

I'm using an older laptop as a SqueezeBox server and it could not handle evdberg's nifty tools. Something you might also want to play with.

However until I can hear a true 24/88 track sound degraded when downsampled to 24/44 I'm not sure I should even go down this path. Currently I hear no difference.

I wonder how Meridian handles 16/88? Will it still do resolution enhancement?

Does SOX do resolution enhancement as well, does it require 24bit output?

Just thinking back to my 518 days, gaining 7dB in the digital domain (back up to 0dB) will do so much to improve the sound in itself that any other system changes could pale into insignificance.

Go on, be cheeky and do a TP/SB3 swap out a few times for us!

Cheers

George

Possibly:

George, I'm certain this is the main improvement.

Not until I've built up a decent sample set for A-B'ing. I'm pretty sure that a short A-B won't reveal much. Actually, all it would do would be to confuse me!

Is adding "dither" (in 24bit) all Meridian Resolution Enhancement is?

I would imagine it's correct behaviour. the radiance would probably not add HDCP to a source that wasn't protected on the way on, and the same for the HD621 I imagine. unprotected LPCM input probably goes out unprotected too.

dave

PS. I've just acquired 3 DSP33's so I guess I ought to try the +3db trick myself...