Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems New to M, and befuddled by surround rear/side precedence

Thanks for the responses. Yes, I'm finding that each re-reading of documentation (for this and other models), combined with commentaries from other sources, provides additional hints or perspective. It's what I imagine studying Talmud must be like.

I can't help but worry (mostly based on theory) that if the people mixing soundtracks for consumer release are assuming side surrounds but M is assuming rear, *something* won't be quite right.

But then, in practice, things sound pretty darned good.

I'm particularly impressed with how organic and nondestructive some of the DSP presets can sound, as compared with implementations I've heard in other equipment. I've certainly never before heard a center synthesized from stereo and integrated as successfully as Trifield manages to do.

And when I told my spinning-disc player to do the decoding and pass LPCM to the HD621, so the HD621 could do its newfangled apodizing magic while upsampling those sources at upsample-able rates, I was most impressed with how much less "digital" (in that now-old-fashioned sense referring to poorly-implemented digital) things could sound - particularly dramatically, to me, from lossy regular-DVD soundtracks. And CDs sound quite good via this path, despite the potential disadvantages of subjecting their bits to HDMI travel.

Yes, this lashup will be worth the trouble to learn how to tune.