Trifield was one of the main reasons that I started down the Meridian road in the first place. I've got L/C/R speakers and processor but only a CD player, so multi-channel sources are not relevant yet. An important and non-upgradable part of my music system, my ears, are not "balanced": I don't know exactly what the problem is, I've never had it checked. My hearing is generally quite acute but I have trouble localising the source of sound. I suspect that I've lost some of the high frequency sensitivity in one ear. Anyway, the effect is that with two-speaker stereo systems which I auditioned there was always an unsettling feeling that things were off-centre, with the main vocals over to the right. The 500/568 in Trifield snapped things back into position. I had always assumed this was just because the physical centre speaker was carrying most of the lead vocal, but it may well be the time alignment aspect described in the post above that is doing it. I didn't buy the whole system in one go, but started with the 500 and L/R pair of 5000s. With this setup you still get a balance control which is not just lounder on one side but time aligned too. This created a very "real" shifting of the sound image for me, so perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to the timing factor, possibly to compensate for the other hearing issue. I'm sure that lots of people have less than 20/20 hearing, so this is a important benefit of Trifield.

One thing that I'm still not 100% clear about is Trifield and rear-speakers. Before finding this forum I had assumed that Trifield used three front speakers only, just beacuse of the name and that was how it was demo'd by the dealer. But I've seen postings here that suggest it will use two rear speakers to provide ambiance too. Is that right? If so then I'm quite intrigued to know how it would sound. I think that this year's addition to the system will probably be a G98, mainly for DVD-A. I will probably stretch to upgrading my 568.1 to 568.2 also. An alternative would be to upgrade the processor and buy a couple of DSP 33s as rear speakers, to get more out of my existing CD collection, leaving the DVD player until next year.