Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Re: Message from Meridian concerning Firmware (including Supplementary update)

Dear Mr Stuart

Thank you for returning to the forum to ellucidate on your original posting. I'm extremely grateful that you did as the further explanation makes a lot of sense. Suitably chastened I will be returning my equipment to the original Meridian firmware and waiting for the official updates which I hope won't be too long coming. I will be asking my dealer to enlighten me about when this might be.

My car continues with it's remap but as you point out this only affects the engine ECU and doesn't affect the steering or braking systems of the car! Again thank you for taking the analogy and using it to explain where we were in danger of going wrong.

I hope when you do re-engineer the firmware delivery system it isn't to switch away from it being available on line. My dealer is not that far away but for some very committed Meridian users the dealer may not even be in the same country. Accepting terms and conditions for use before you can use the update system is entirely appropriate in this age. My laptop required I did exactly this as I switched on and Adobe flash player advised me an update was available just now.

Regards

Richard

Hi Bob,

I'm now an old hand here on the forum. As was pointed out in a previous post, we're all on the same side. With that in mind and in the spirit of continuing to foster good relations between Meridian and the HH community, I'd like to say a few things:


Thank you

First, thanks for the update and clarification with regard to modifying firmware. I appreciate your contribution to the forum though, like others, I wish that Meridian was more involved in the forum and pro-active in its communication. I keep my finger close to the pulse, yet was not aware that Meridian was in the "final stages of QA" for multiple product updates. Although there were murmurings, this information had not been posted to the forum with any conviction. Please believe me when I say that I have been asking questions about this through the dealer channel for over a year. At the recent ISE and Bristol shows, I am told that Meridian representatives were extremely tight lipped about forthcoming firmware updates.


Technical product information

May I preface my next point by stating that I recognize that the last few years have been tremendously challenging. Clearly, new investors were needed for Meridian and its employees to have a stable and secure long-term future. It was inevitable that the company had to, and would, change.

However, was it really necessary to throw the baby out with the bath water? From the perspective of this community, in spite of Meridian's undoubted positive intentions, the change to disseminating technical information almost exclusively via the dealer network has been a backwards step. Whether you realize it or not, the company's product documentation leaves much to be desired. It is the main reason why this forum has filled, and continues to fill, an important role in helping Meridian owners get the best out of their equipment; and for many years, this worked really well.

I appreciate that it is no easy feat to operate all aspects of the company to the same stellar standards that the R&D team attains with astonishing regularity. However, being cut off from the Tech Support Team (Des and Edd, in particular) has been problematic and frustrating.

So what should the role of the forum be? In the absence of a comprehensive Meridian Tech Support site, I'd always hoped that HH would become an unofficial support portal. However, that requires access to product information and documentation, tech notes and the like; documents which are not company confidential information, but which are sent out to dealers and used to be sent out to individual customers; and access to Meridian employees when we are truly stumped.


Leveraging the HH Community

Thanks to you and Meridian, I have learned a lot about digital audio, enough to experiment with minimum phase upsampling filters with my Squeezebox Server and Transporter and to hold a competent conversation about said filters with Charles Hanson of Ayre Acoustics on this forum. At the same time, I've realized how much I don't know and could never know without a lifetime of experience working in the industry. [doffs cap]

On the flip side, there are some major Meridian customers among the active posters here, and many more customers browse the forum as unregistered users. Collectively, we use your products in more configurations and in conjunction with more third party products than you could ever hope to test. Additionally, we represent a data gold mine of what products we own, what we would like to own, and product and product feature ideas.

This community is the sort of group that many marketeers and R&D teams would give their eye teeth for. We, a cross-section of many of your customers (I wouldn't claim all) are the ones who can tell you what you've done right, what you've not done so well, and what you've missed altogether. That you have never reached out to learn from this community is very surprising to me. In fact, you give the *impression*, accurate or not, that you think you know what your customers want and that you don't need any input from us. This was true even of the HH1 and HH2 events.

Let me give an example: I think it's fair to say that everyone present at HH1 was truly astounded at the capabilities of the F80 (many of us, myself included, went on to buy one or more), but a sizeable number of us were also surprised at its lack of any networking capabilities. At a time when you and a number of your colleagues were talking about the problems of low bit-rate lossy downloads getting scattered over multiple computers, a number of us had ripped our entire CD collections losslessly (and bit-accurately) to a central computer and were streaming this information to multiple clients around our houses; and we had been doing this for a number of years.

I'd like to believe that you do recognize that, in spite of the fact that we are not Meridian employees, members of the HH community have something to offer you. To take advantage of this, you need to participate in dialogue with us, not in short conversation snippets at HH events or trade shows, but via continuous and long term involvement either on the forum, or greater than five minute open discussions with forum members where you don't have to reveal your secrets, but both parties can discuss ideas.

I've been testing security software for over a decade, software that is deployed to over 50 million desktops and which cannot fail in the field without significant cost in dollar terms and company reputation. I know a thing or two about product management, the development of unambiguous requirements, and testing the product meets those requirements. I would jump at the opportunity to sit down with a you, a bunch of your engineers and a bunch of other Hitchhikers to discuss many of the issues that crop up from time to time when new products are released (why doesn't it have such and such? etc.) and to share our ideas about what we'd like to see in the future. That's an open offer.


Thanks for reading this. As usual, I wish Meridian and its employees the very best now and for the future.

Joel

A few observations:

1. Were I in bob stuart's postion, I suspect I'd have responded in similar fashion - so I find his comments reasonable.
2. Human nature being what it is, comments are always interpretted differently - no matter how carefully or completely articulated. We are all a product of our experiences, biases, and priorities - and we all see things differently. This should come as no suprise to him as he observes.
3. I do find the comment about 'some may be (temporarily) confused into thinking that different = better' both amusing and ironic. Hiend companies have sold the perception of sound quality improvements since the dawn of time, so to suggest that we as users are incapable of arriving at clear conclusions seems a curious position to take. Certainly sound quality improvements ARE best evaluated over time, and absent any official firmware improvements, longterm use of the 'rogue' program may well prove to be less satisfying.
4. Enthusiast communites are a pain in the a$$. I've been in the service business, and the most committed 'fans' are both an incredible asset and a major headache. They are never happy and only too quick to point out your deficiencies. You can either embrace the feedback or be annoyed by it; and in this day and age with easy on-line access to information, I'd suggest the former is a far better approach.
5. Over-reliance on a dwindling dealer network is already a problem for the hiend, and is likely to get worse. Some friends of mine run Krell, and this is becomming a real issue for them. Hopefully, Meridian also recognize this and will adapt their business model appropriately.

Simon

I informed my dealer, lets see if something comes from that

Ooops! Really bad typing skills turns 'friends' into 'fiends'.

I would like a comment from Meridian on the +3dB tweak before it releases firmware updates. This is a "feature" that I do not want to lose.

+1

Also I wouldn't like there to be any new mechanisms deployed that prevented rolling back to a legitimate firmware version should we not like the sonic result of a new release. However, I appreciate this may not be an option for all products as it isn't currently.

Avii

Some time ago ncpl (I think it was him) posted an interesting piece citing a discussion of what happens when a company moves from a "family" relationship with its customers to a corporate relationship. [I am sorry that I cannot post a link but I don't remember the title of the thread, or even any keywords: perhaps ncpl could help here please (if it was him)?]

Perhaps Meridian can now be persuaded to veer back towards the "family" model (though families of course have their squabbles and misunderstandings).

I can almost guarantee that this will happen. Meridian did this once with 598 firmware: the new firmware locked the product to prevent the application of earlier versions.

We can only hope that common sense prevails and the "customer" is given the option to choose the sonic character they prefer.

Avii

I may have misunderstood the 'not want to lose' bit.

Was the +3db tweak firmware or config? I have never applied it so do not know, but I didn't think it affected firmware so would not be 'lost' if Meridian changed the firmware delivery mechanism.