Originally Posted by George Mills
However I find it a little odd when someone says they could not get enough slam out of an HD621/861V6. Or Detail for that matter. This just tells me they had a huge setup problem.

As I've pointed out at avs before, I'd blame a bad matching of components for any such problem. That can be very time consuming to get it right and it would not only require to change a single, but multiple components like amps, speakers, maybe cables to get everything right. This happened to me many times before. That is why I think that active or digital speakers will be the future of HT and maybe even 2-channel music. There's been huge progress the past few years in that area from many manufacturers including Meridian, Adam and Dynaudio to name a few.

Between the v4 and v6 there is a huge sonic difference. At this point I could never go back to the v4, but maybe it doesn't match to well with some other equipment... who knows.

I've used both (among others, in several systems) and always found the v6 to be more detailed than the Mach IV. I know two Mach IV owners who have both used it in the HTs and both ended up replacing them with a v6/HD621 combo. One put the Mach IV into his living room system (tv based) and added a Trinnov to it, the other put it into the entrance area of the HT for music playback and console games. Both are still happy with it.

There are differences between the v6s as well, the digital (SpeakerLink), balanced and unblanaced outputs. It's a little hard to compare the digital to the analogue outputs now, due to the possible difference the AC12 + hooked up external DAC makes. But even the difference between the unbalanced and balanced output cards make quite a difference. Similar to the v4, I found the unbalanced cards underperforming and somewhat disappointing. I'm not even sure why Meridian bothers still offering the unbalanced outputs.

- Stephan