Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Meridian Explorer

It does not have coax digital out. Only optical. So you will need an optical/coax converter.

It would give a very high quality analogue output and SPDIF from a laptop/Mac. Probably good enough to run into a high quality hifi system to give excellent SQ.

It's a relatively cheap DAC and plugged into a PC, will give full file access (192/24) to your music server. It's going to sound great as a headphone station, so anyone who listens to their laptop will get a big SQ bump through desktop speakers/headphones.

I think I good number of people will use these for running full hifi systems. It opens up cheap easy storage on a PC/NAS through player software on the PC to... whatever you want!

Yeah, that's kinda what I was thinking- as a second-room system this could be great, even for a first room if it had coax/apodizing. I can justify 800 series for the main system but not for other rooms.

I do applaud this from Meridian though- high time they had a high performance yet affordable component or two- can only be good for the company and therefore all of us!

Optical/coax converters - are such things any good? I guess I could source a 2nd hand Meridian component with optical in, coax out.

The 518 will probably not be enough for this, won't pass 24/96 through. By the time you get to 568s etc you're talking lot of moolah and might as well go straight to Sooloos.

A lot of folks here use the M-Audio C02 or C03 as a cheap substitute.

It might. Get a Lightning to USB adapter and go into the Explorer out to a set of headphones. That might work. I don't see it wouldn't work.

Would it supply the power to run the Explorer? It wouldn't be accessing files directly, it would be post Apple's DAC. You've need to give Apple money to get at the files (License), I've not heard of a product that does that yet.

Tintin, are you sure about that ?

Very doubtful it'll work with an iPhone. I would imagine Meridian would be heavily marketing that aspect if it did, for one thing!

Am I sure, errr no, not 100%. Checking frantically now...

TinTins right. You cant just access the digital stream from the apple dock connector. You have to pay them money. There is a nice bit of kit available from Cypherlabs that does it, it can also hook up to a standard laptop so covers both bases.

Cyperlabs

You can get them in the UK but they are more expensive than the Explorer. They also have an internal battery which makes me doubt even more that the explorer would be compatible directly with an iPhone. Shame, though, because that would be the tipping point for me.

Of course I dont have an explorer so havent actually tried this, and it may actually "just work"(TM). But Im doubtful.

Looks a nice bit of kit though.

Cheers
Greg

There is this

"You may also be able to use some USB audio/MIDI devices with the iPad Camera Connector or Lightning to USB Camera Adapter."

from Apple, maybe a chink there.

(Reading around, the audio out from the iPhone5 is supposed to be poorer SQ than previous iPhones-through their DAC.)