Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Meridian Offer QNAP & dBpoweramp Support

That's a sweeping statement.

Have you ever looked at or tried Channel D|Pure Music?

Not the person youre replying to, but I tried Channel D/Pure Music, Audirvana, and Jplay in memory mode, etc, etc, when demoing USB dacs. None of them got over what I came to feel was a fundamental problem in using a computer and USB, it's simply not optimised for audio.

A streamer which pulls music over a network, rather than USB, and isolates from the electrically noisy components in PCs/NAS, etc, is a different story. Meridian, Naim, and many others now have good solutions for this, and you choose the interface and sonics you're happy with, just as with CD Players, IMO...

I hope you are correct Ge03. A new low cost core product would probably be enough incentive for me to jump in.

In the mean time, the QNAP plugin is live in the support section. Any brave QNAP owners around who care to share their experiences before I order mine?

@ One2Many,
Each to his own but I given the line up you have with your amps and speakers I would suggest that the entry price is already in the right range. If my music was coming through an Apple TV I would have paid the entry price for an MC200 and MS600 way before now.

What ya waiting for?

@ncpl, you are correct. To each his own. Please elaborate how you think a $4000 MC200 plus $3500 MS600 is in the right range. The apple TV is $99.

Given your amp and speaker setup, I'm curious - why be prepared to spend so much on what comes after the source and expect a far cheaper source to do it justice? The entry point for a system of your class and expense would be an MS600 at least.

With QNAP X69 servers with WD Red drives running to about �500 for a 6TB twin drive or somewhere under �1000 for a 12TB with four drives making storage available at acceptable market rates.

I'm curious as to what you feel would be an acceptable target price point for a Control:15 replacement, a touch screen monitor with Core ability but no storage?

Should it have audio end zone abilities such as RJ45 & SPDIF or is the MS200 enough?

I don't see Meridian diluting the market need for the ID40/ID41 option as the state of the art but perhaps something between that and the MS200?

Actually, the Apple Express is only $50 and would be much better suited to your needs as it wouldn't constantly resample the music to 16/48 as the ATV does.

Likewise, given your question above, I'm sure that you would likely feel that the AE is a close competitor to your Briston Preamp... And that one of those Bose units a likely competitor in sound quality to your Dynaudio's.

To elaborate... whenever I built my hifi's I followed a rule of thumb that meant I would try and not let any end of the chain get out of sync performance-wise with the rest. That would generally mean that the source units would keep pace with the amps and speakers as my system grew over the years.

No point in my mind having a great set of pre-amps and power amps feeding nice speakers if I didn't match that with a similarly good source.

So, in my head, I would have a better source feeding those nice Brystons and Dynaudio's. Given the cost of those together I would personally seek to get the very best out of them and put more than the $99 ATV up front.

Not sure if you quoted the US RRP's of the units but of late you could get both of these from good dealers for much less than this.

No offence intended at all. Just a casual observation prompted by your earlier comment about needing a cheaper Sooloos entry point.

My Sooloos updated to v 2.406 (build 332) this evening when I arrived home from a long weekend. I will get around to buying dBpa eventually.

I checked the QNAP and dBpa websites - not even a news update mentioning either product or collaboration with M... clearly not very important to them.

The cheapest QNAP 2 bay is little less than 400� while the the 4 bay little more than 550�, and that is without drive.
The one pictured on the Meridian pdf is the TS569pro, it cost 850�...
I love the idea of the cheap Sooloos storage though. Meridian did the right move as home NAS is increasingly popular and a burden I guess for them.