Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat CES?

We do not know what kind of pressure Meridian and its staff have been put under. They may very well have intended to do many things but have been overtaken by events. They must have found the almost-constant hostility on this forum somewhat disheartening, not least after they went to the trouble of hosting HH2.

I know that they have not answered questions, or delivered updates, or fixed Trifield. And they have made themselves more remote from their customers (though I do not see why they should necessarily answer all customers's questions directly). And the AC12 affair was a disaster. I am not blind to their shortcomings.

And the new Xmos chips may render all our kit out-of-date.

Nonetheless, I am sure that your friendly and courteous approach is most likely to pay dividends.

Hi Asa
Just to stress again that it was the LOSSY DD/DTS Decoding that I preferred in the 861 versus that in a Panasonic Bluray player........equally, there is the possibility that my preference could be driven by Source Output Jitter being more audible on PCM rather than Bitstream.......but I can never know for sure which it is

Of course, Meridian should have offered Firmware Upgrades to D8k Owners.....as they did for D5K2 owners

Having said that, I think Apodizing

1) has more of a benefit on Music material than on DVD Movie material......basically Pre & Post Echos being more audible on music

2) Apodizing being more important for 44k Sources (CD) than 48khz material (DVD Movies)........at 24khz, Pre Echoing is less of an issue than at 22khz

Also worth remembering that the D8k's will Upsample standard rate Data anyway

Meridian should release the PROMISED Firmware Upgrades for the D8k's

I think we already passed that station ...

Hi Asa

I think Ronnie's pretty much covered it but I was going to mention that most signals getting to an 8k are going to be already native hi-res or or upsampled to 88.2/96 from lower res sources via an M SSP. The addition of apodizing to the 8k upsampling would therefore not see much use. I don't think anyone would limit the G68/861vx output to HS=N just to get apodized in the speaker.

The only format that would get apodized is the movie material decoded in the SSP which as stated above is not where the benefit is really felt. The brain is too busy watching the pictures to worry about the need for the filters.

I think HQ may well have to choose carefully where it puts its time and resources. I would be shocked if 8k f/w came above Trifield fix for example.


On a related matter mentioned above regarding the general poor state of relations both real and perceived between Meridian and it's customers (albeit HH'ers) - I was reading a book recently called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Chapter 4 is about The Cost of Social Norms. A piece of text jumped out at me w.r.t. HH and HQ.


It's well worth a read. I have chopped this quite a bit to make the point, but, it's relevance to M and HH is quite clear to me.

M have made a decision to switch to market norms only i.e. business is business. For those of us that enjoyed the previous model we find the transition painful.

For new M customers who never experienced the earlier model they will not feel any of that.

I don't doubt that M had very serious reasons for shifting their business model.

Someone needs to get that to Bob...

Hi Ronnie

Yes, that is what I took you to mean.

And I knew about the 8ks upsampling abilities.

But the questions you were asking (and answering) were nonetheless interesting. And it would also be good to hear what difference apodising in the 8ks would make.

And of course Meridian should deliver on their promise!

Perhaps I am oversimplifying but does this:
Not lead to this:

So you break off all diplomatic relations and we never get anything except a bad taste in the mouth? What is your solution?

Well said Asa. Meridian have never been anything but friendly and courteous to me and I intend to repay it in kind.

+1 on Frank.

It is what it is. We have to find ways of making it work. Constant negativity, whilst perhaps reflecting on how some feel in the transition of business models, will not lead to a positive outcome.

That doesn't mean that serious questions should not be asked when the opportunity arises.

OK, as we are discussing the relative merit of apodising in 5200's here are my observations. When I had my old style 5200's I upgraded the firmware to obtain the apodising filter along with other crossover tweaks. Running a non upsampled signal from my G68 to obtain 'apodising' gave a rather 'flat' feeling to the sound. Feeding an upsampled feed seemed to give a bit more life to the music, but of course, no apodising. Of the two I preferred the upsampled sound so did not really benefit from apodising. When I changed my system to a full SL version with a G61SL and could output both an upsampled and apodised feed to the 5200 SL's there was a definite improvement to the sound I was then hearing. Difficult to explain what the nuts and bolts of the improvement was it just 'was' better sounding. Of course when I got my 861v6 ...well that is another story!

Rod

If I owned 8K's and didn't get the firmware update and 5200's did I'd be disappointed.

It could effect their resale value.

Some may choose to run their best 2 Channel Source into D2. And some folks did and still do.

And if you mostly listen to 44K CD's you *might* be best off setting G68nonSL/861v4 to HS=N and letting 8K's (state of the art) Upsample/Apodize.

I'd certainly expect the capability if it's feasable.

If I bought a luxary car with say manual override shifter that I never used; is that an excuse to upgrade the performance of the manual shifter on the econo model for free and never bother on the luxury model?

Meridian is so inconsistent lately.

My only guess is that some of these issues like Trifield width may be hardware related and they don't wish to offer a hardware upgrade to fix it. This could explain why 861v6 got the fix but G68SL did not (G68SL may be more like a G68ADV). It's mind boggling if it is just firmware that 861v6 gets it and G68SL deoes not. I realize it's not 100% sure G68SL didn't get it. But you would think Meridian would get the word out if it is fixed. Or is that just admitting to 861v4/G68nonSL that it's indeed broken HARDWARE. Oh what a mess.

Likewise, 8K's were designed quite some time ago now and the processing chips might not have the mips to do apodizing. You need to be careful of Total MIPs vs MIPs per chip. They may of consolidated into one faster chip on 5200's. Where 8000.1 might use several slower chips but with possibly more total mips. Or 5200's, 7200's, 808's, HD621, 861v6 are using a new family of chips that only has the apodizing code. That doesn't quite jive with the 861v6 vs 861v4 having the exact same mips, but it is still feasable (i.e. they could have consolidated into fewer more powerful chips).

It's all hard to say. But there must be some reasons for what appears from the outside as nuts.

I suspect some of this is going on. But Meridian believes silence is the best policy or they will just get themselves in deeper water. They rather see their customers duke it out over the speculation.

I think many of us are puzzled and trying to justify in our own minds and experience what's going on.

By the way from a hardware point of view Meridian has done an AMAZING job of getting huge life spans out of complex electronics. DSP chips usually only run 3-5 years. So they either bought TONS of chips way in advance. Or they gradually migrated to newer generations but still using a single code base. That's really hard. We run into issues like this a lot. Because the systems may cost $500K and last 5-20 Years.