I am quite into DIY and the difference the PS may have is sometimes surprising. The Meridian gear is quite well designed (the final boards I mean, with decent local decoupling and so on) so they can put those ugly/cheap SMPS's in most of their gear without (much) fear.
As you know the 8xx series have an extra board after the SMPS (just some cheap regulators and some more filtration with decent caps) but this is still not much compared to a good regulated PS. And the old 500 series (like 568) used linear PS with quite good capacitors and linear regulators (they stay quite warm even in standby), see internal pics on Duncan's web. If I remember correctly, the G02 is the only 'new' M gear with a linear PS (and nice toroidal too), besides the speakers off course.
An example: in my Buffalo DAC I use a Sigma22 (google please) bipolar PS for the analog out stage and the difference this makes to the sound compared to a 'good' standard linear regulator (78xx+79xx chips) is not small. And the 'good' regulator is quite ahead of what is inside our M gear, so...
One day (I hope) I will have time (and courage) to do this to my 861 (I am even considering a G68 to experiment).
And I always wondered how far the SQ of my 808.2 may be pushed this way.
Something I know is, if the day arrives to my 861 PS, I know what I will NOT put inside it
(edited)
See Nick's post above: inside multiK$ gear there is a 20? pound power supply. Most audio gur�s will tell you the first limiting factor of any audio gear (be it CD plater, DAC, preamp or power amp) is inside the power supply... Hey, fingers up to Meridian to find a decent smps and make it work on a such high level as we all know around here!
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