Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems HelpPlease - Looking to buy a new Blu-Ray player

BTW, I have done a comparison of my Oppo and Meridian 800 as CD players, and had a pretty clear preference for the latter (albeit somewhat narrower than I'd expected). It is a bit unfair, though, as the 800 is not 'saddled' with HDMI.

It has proven to be a little tough to find a worthwhile Bluray player to compare with the Oppo - the only ones I find to be interesting are the CompliBlu and the Ayre, and nobody I know has one unfortunately.

That's half the point though, isn't it? Meridian recognized long ago that achieving the lowest jitter transfer possible over SPDIF (upsampling) and minimizing correlated jitter (MHR) was best for the highest sound quality.

Did you test 800 SPDIF bs Oppo HDMI + HD621? Or what precise combination of devices and interfaces?

i don't know if audiocom provided any data. if they do it may not be Independent and even if it is Independent there have been a number of circumstances where, on paper, i should not be able to discern a difference between two components and yet in real life i have.

Well, I compared 800 via SPDIF versus BDP83 via both SPDIF and HDMI, the latter obviously using HD621. I did these comparisons with both the 861v4 and 861v6. When playing CD, with the v4, I found the performance of both players to be very close (I could not reliably differentiate the Oppo SPDIF vs. HDMI) although ultimatley preferred the 800. When playing CD, with the v6, the superiority of 800 became somewhat more apparent.

These comparisons do not, however, tell much about the 'levelling' effect of the HD621. One would have to compare mulitple players outputting over HDMI, which I have not done.