No. The screen is still 1024x768 points (not pixels) irrespective of whether you are using retina display or not. Since applications use points rather than pixels, the screen is the same size so if you place text or images etc they are going to be in exactly the same positions and size on all iPads. Behind the scenes, iOS does the scaling, so will automatically use higher resolution text (but at same size) and buttons etc to give a crisper image. This is what is happening on the right of the album display but not on the left and is very marked difference in quality. For images, iOS tries to automatically load a high resolution version of the image (with @2x appended to the file name) and if it doesnt find one (ie app has not been optimised for retina), it scales the image x2. This will result in a non optimal quality image (same quality as iPad gen 1+2 quality) and I believe this is what we are seeing, but it is not a poor image compared with the buttons and text.

I wonder if Meridian are somehow converting text and buttons on left of screen to a bitmap and using that instead which is then scaled rather than high resolution versions being substituted?

Meridian owner since 1992
Prime & PSU, Focal Elear headphones, Roon (ROCK 8Gi5 NUC), Explorer 1 & 2, F80. 200/203, various Sonos (via Roon).