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.

- Fiddler (IMHO)

If you think listening to music is fun, try learning an instrument.
HT: G61RSL, 4x5K, 5.5KHC, 2xSC6000, Transporter, HD621, Philips BDP7501 4K, Tivo, 65" LG OLED 4K C6
Computer: Foobar2000, 5K, Mojo, HiFiMan HE1000 V2