Originally Posted by ncpl
Interesting to compare the entry level to the flagship DSP side-by-side. How was it ?

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)

Photographer, computer geek, listener, lad-about-town.
{ Lumin U2 Mini, ( {Apple TV, other HDMI gizmos} -> HD621) } -> 861v8 -> BAT VK-6200 -> {2x804S, HTM3S, 2xDS8S} -> ears.