Originally Posted by George Mills
Meridian seems to only put linear where ever an analog Amp is needed.
I'm not sure I take everything M say at face value, but their approach to keep digital video away from whatever does the D to A conversion makes sense. Similarly it would make sense to keep SMPS away from DACs as well, and sure enough the DSP speakers use linear PSUs don't they?

That argument seems to fall down with controllers though. I think the 561 & 568 use linear supplies, but the rest are switch mode, and they perform D to A conversion.

There are many reasons that make me think linear supplies would be better with digital audio components as well, and this Why Meridian FIFO isn't perfect thread by VK is an example of one:
Originally Posted by VirusKiller
Originally Posted by Wadia article
Noise created by digital data stream is one of the most insidious and little known methods for jitter to infect the clock signal. The digital data stream is a sequence of electrical pulses which, as the stream travels through the circuitry, radiates noise. This noise is correlated to the data that is encoded in the stream. <snip> Noise radiated by the digital stream infects the clock with jitter whose characteristics are related to the digital stream.
I'll spell it out if you've not got it already:

The assertion that a FIFO buffer will work perfectly and reduce jitter to utterly insignificant levels is predicated on the assumption that the master clock (that is doing the re-clocking) is perfect. What Wadia is saying is that the very presence of a digital stream will produce (analogue) electrical noise in the circuit-boards and pollute the master clock. And, worse than that, the jitter introduced into the master clock may be highly correlated with the audio signal if no steps have been taken to minimize the correlation.
Extending the theme, PSU switching noise may corrupt the audio clock just like audio data corrupts it - perhaps even more.

Nick