Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems NYC HH meetup on Thursday March 10th, 2011

Definately worth stopping by if you find yourseld in downtown New York.

It was nice to put faces to names - although I did not get a chance to talk with everyone.

While I find Sooloos interesting, I'm not much of a social music listener - I'm pretty happy with CDs. The one thing that did strike me was the amount of hirez music they had loaded onto the unit - much of it not available on CD.

The new bookshelves sound surprisingly good - they're not 8000s, but they cost a lot less too. Bass performance was very impressive, as was imaging. Probably not good for a big room, but interesting in a smaller one.

Although I am more an audio rather than video guy, the 810 demo absolutley blew me away. The best picture I have seen ever, by a considerable margin. Black levels were very good, brightness uniformity was excellent, and detail was mind-blowing. 2.35 is a GREAT way to watch movies, although they do need to get a Bluray player that does subtitle shift.

Simon

Yes, thank you Mike for organizing, and even if I didn�t get the chance to meet many, especially since I arrived late, it was good to finally put some faces on the pseudo (Bill, Mike and Kal Smith from Home Theater of Long Island).

It was especially interesting to me since I�m pretty new to the digital Meridian world. I had a 101B/103D for some years, but I just bough three DSP3100 and a G68D, following some Hitchhikers recommendations. So it was my first encounter with the 8K, and boy, it�s something I�ll remember.

On the other hand, I�m not sold on the Sooloos system. As mentioned to the Meridian rep, yes, I can see it as a bonus for the experience, but in terms of sound quality improvement, speakers - to me - are what will make most difference for the money. Ideally, you�d want both: the comfort of the best user interface with a stellar sound, but since I can�t afford it at Meridian�s level, I have to set up priorities.

Nice to meet people (Simon, David, Jerome, Bill...others like the guy from Jersey City). Thanks for coming out in the pouring rain!

We split into two groups, the first group (my group) was given the Sooloos demonstration by Ken, the director of product marketing for Meridian USA. There were over 10,000 albums loaded onto that Sooloos, several TwinStores on the LAN. It was speedy and the User interface is first rate. A new AC200 driving 2 5200 DSP speakers, it sounded great ! Q: Why kill Trifield ? A: AC200 is not for multi-speaker room, for office or smaller spaces. It did sound great, and I love Trifield!

The new six-zone Sooloos box was displayed. Impressive number of outputs, a high-speed backplane to allow multi-zone sync (not displayed).

We ripped a brand new CD i bought, 3 minutes on-the dot!

We asked about multi-channel high-bitrate support for Sooloos, Ken wouldn't commit to a Yes or No, sorry Carl!

Great demo, a desirous object ...

Next up, DSP3200 speakers, in white, in the home theater.
Ryan explained M. has been asked for years and years to replicate the "top part" of the DSP8K's and make them into a speaker. They took that idea (DSP3200 look a lot like the top of a DSP8K ...) and some of the R&D of the M80 speaker to make a great sounding bookshelf speaker.

So, no subwoofer, stereo direct from Sooloos SL into 861V6 ...

They started off with AC/DC, when into Jazz prog with Foursquare, played some Techno which made us cringe collectively, and played some Jane Monheit.

I use passive bookshelf speakers (Ascend 170's...) and these blew them away...impressive soundstage , went pretty low bass-wise, no distortion or clipping ... I'd like to hear them with my subwoofer and Bass management engaged, but it was great to listen without in the HT room.

I kept looking around, seeing the size of the speakers and listening to the music, amazed at the sound coming out of them!

Then we switched to the DSP8K's and played some more music, they sounded even more amazing, amazing detail in the mid range and high end, brought out music to its full potential with the RC. To fill larger rooms, I would buy these :-) !

The projector worked fine, we watched a selection of scenes from Baraka, Apocolypto, the Police Blu-Ray (sounded amazing on the 8K's..),
I am not a Projector guy but this looked great and sounded amazing.

They have been successful selling the high-end projector to rich director types (people like Steven Spielberg or P. Diddy I guess...). When I win the lottery... The glass used takes 3 months to manufacture, something like 2 months just to cool down....

A wonderfully entertaining evening. Thanks to Kal of HTOLI, Ryan, Ken and all the Hitchhikers and NY customers who came out. Let's do it again soon!

-MJT

Answer as expected but many thanks for asking, the more people that ask the better.

Regards,
Carl

Ryan mentionned that although this title is now out-of-print, he'd let me have it for $225,000 and throw in the 810 for free. What a wonderful guy!

That was indeed interesting to hear. Those tiny little speakers definitely stirred more air up than you'd expect for the size, having no trouble filling the room with more than sufficient volume. I guess I'm a little bit spoiled, so I definitely missed the low-bass foundation the music should've had, and wasn't sure I was in love with the subtlety of the high treble; but they were certainly enthusiastic little things. And of course it's hard to draw truly good conclusions with unfamiliar music, especially when the first volleys of listening were at deafeningly loud showoff levels, followed up with a demo of how softly the speakers could play with the highs and lows still in subjectively proper proportions, during which my ears were probably still cringing and ringing from the earlier assault.

What's up with that? Is it some kind of guy thing? I mean, it's great that nothing blew up or melted, or even sounded particularly strained, but it hurt. I recall with some embarrassment that I probably used to do that to people with my new car stereo when I was 20, but I got over it. Well, unless visitors really really insist...

But anyway. This was my first exposure to Meridian DSP speakers, of which I'd heard so much for lo these several years, and it's clear that the technology has much to recommend it. I do indeed think the magical, DSP-based variable loudness compensation is a neat feature I'd like to have, and once we got to listen to the 8Ks, and especially toward the end of the evening when someone was kind enough to let me play a couple of songs I'm quite familiar with over the 8Ks, I may have begun to get a proper notion of what they might be about sonically. I have to admit that I still prefer my own stereo-music-listening setup, for intimacy, subtlety of detail and microdynamics, although I thought the 8Ks approximately tied my setup for ability to play loudly without a sense of strain. But my stereo, its setup, and the room are things I've put entirely too much time into fine-tuning, and indeed many of the basic principles are similar to what Meridian are doing: I'm using insanely efficient Avantgarde horns for the highs and mids (so the coils just won't be dissipating enough power to get hot, where Meridian ensure this with clever digital modeling), corner woofers with multiple fast 10-inch drivers for the bass, TacT DSP-based room correction to allow that good corner bass coupling but smooth the response, separate TacT amps for each frequency range, DSP-based crossovers where needed, careful use of digital delay for driver time coherence... anyway, much setup. If I had friends who wanted to throw money at a great audio system and just have somebody trundle a basically-working setup into the room in a crate or three, I'd definitely suggest that a Meridian system be on their audition shortlist.

It was during my all-too-brief time in the movie-watching demo that I was most impressed. That whole DSP-speaker setup, with large speakers at all four corners of the room (8Ks in front, 7200s I think in back) and guided, of course, by the mighty 861v6, had a sound which was big, effortless, and rock-solid. It was definitely in a different class from my TV-watching system, with the small but sincere analog speakers and amplification, and my bargain used 568.2mm pulling the strings.

And also during that demo: ye gods, that projector!

It's something it hadn't even occurred to me to expect to see on this visit. You expect that, even though it's a massive improvement over SD, 1080P from Blu-ray would start to look a little pixelly once it got blown up onto a ten-foot-wide(!) screen. Not this thing, with its magical 1080-to-4K scaling which somehow managed to make it look as if the detail between the original pixels was real. Crazy, impossibly good. Apparently Meridian are good at this whole upsampling thing, whether it be for the ears or the eyes. I don't expect ever to have the budget or even space for that sort of video setup, but now I know what can be done. Damn.

Oh, and the Sooloos system, which was being pushed pretty hard, and in which I'd had zero interest before going: now I'm... no longer completely uninterested, despite already having an extensive, working and excellent-sounding-in-key-rooms Squeezebox-family system about the house. The user interface for interacting with one's library is great, the options for expanding storage sound workable, and the import and backup facilities seem as if they should do the job. H'mm.

Thanks to MJT5282 for pulling this together!

My apologies if this is overlong; I wanted to be descriptive.

-Jeff (the guy from Jersey City)

Just to be precise, there were 2 8Ks in the front and one 7200HC.
Simon

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't clear on exactly what flavor the sizeable horizontal center was - although I now see it was specified in some pre-event notes, and besides, I guess there's no 8K-family center.

There is but it's simply another vertical 8K. I don't think I could believe them if they came out with a horizontal 8K.