Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Moving to a Streaming Setup (A Bit of a Ramble, Sorry)

I might say the sales guy told me so.
But overall, I look at the profile of hardware and software and the price of the various devices in the Sooloos family. And I remember my experience where feeding the Oppo through the very recent HD621 was noticeably better than feeding it straight into the 8-year old G68 (SPDIF), and noticeably better than the Sonos feeding the G68 through SPDIF. And I hasten to emphaseze that I am no golden-eared fanatic, but this was noticeable even though unexpected: I was thinking bits are bits and I got the various devices for convenience.

I know there are other issues like jitter, but the G68 is supposed to de-jitter. So I attributed the change to apodising, the only difference I am aware of.

And this all made the story sound credible to me: the basic idea is always to feed the bits into the DAC, but some of the Sooloos devices do a better job of signal processing, particularly through apodising. And the argument I heard was that the ID40 and the MS600 were the most advanced, so if you don't have an 808 or 861 the MDS600 is the sweet spot of price.

I also didn't want to spend money on a C15, because I don't see any future in M investing in touch screen panels. This may have been cool when they made the Sooloos acquisition, but the C15 user experience is already obsolete compared to modern touch devices (iPad, the new Windows 8), and the price is 10x that of a modern tablet due to the economies of scale. So I think M needs to get out of this business and concentrate on the sound.

So a C15 wasn't an option. MC200: I had this belief in the higher SQ, and I wanted more storage. So MS600+MD600 it was.

Now that the user interface became a problem, that ruined my whole thinking. I think this is a major mistake on M's part: the Media Source devices like the MS600 and ID40 must work on their own without requiring a "core".

But in the meantime, I got a good price on an old C10. Which I won't use very much because it doesn't fit in my living room (it's a dang desktop, so last century!), but I can hook it up to the Ethernet.