Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk

Sorry to keep beating this horse (already dead) and I know you are going to buy something now. But if not now, you should evaluate priorities (several messages ago) when building out your room. I have chased a Meridian dream since the 1980s and have always had nice sounds. I started working with an acoustician last August and am not yet quite done. My cost with her are about 50-50 for measurements & consulting,and for materials. In my case, I've got about 85% of overall cost in gear and 15% in room treatment costs. I'd estimate subjectively that the gains from room treatment are way, way more than 15%. More than if I had moved to 8000s, I would say, because the room was the limiting factor. Just my opinion, ymmv of course.

HI Jim

Don't worry about beating the dead horse... the next time thread I respond to is damn sure going to mention room treatment regardless of whether it's a tagging problem, Boot Camp issue or for sale thread!

Joking aside - thanks for responding, it's a significant statistic that you state about the improvements. Would you say that your room was originally particularly bad for audio playback? I've asked my local hi-fi shop if they can recommend room treatment before and they didn't seem to know much about it and couldn't recommend anyone.

I would love to know what is causing my bass issues for certain.
I will start another thread soon about finding a local expert.

BTW were your spend figures based on new or second hand equipment?

Thanks
Tom

Hi Tom,

I am willing to pop in and see you in regards to your bass issues, I have seen many issues like this during my years working at Meridian.

I live in Histon, Cambridge so just stones throw from you.

Regards
Edd

This has just reminded me of an old review of the DSP5Ks (if memory serves) which mentioned that dealers would be able to 'enter the bios' of the speaker to compensate for room modes.

It was a vague reference, but I took it to mean they might be able to (for a fee) measure the room and then use the built in DSP to store correction curves (a bit like MRC but on a semi-permanent, non-user friendly, way). Was this ever a reality? If not, is it possible?

No, I'm pretty sure that "BIOS" refers to the standard Free, Wall and Corner boundary placement options, and that the review hails from a less IT-savvy era...

It was probably referring to being able to set the speaker to Free, Boundary or Corner in the config.

Regards,
Carl

This kind of generalisation is not helpful. Yes there seemed to be a problem with the metadata server a few weeks ago, but in the last two days I have imported 39 CDs from FLAC, of which only two were not found by the server. The rest were all correctly found, mostly with full credits.

The two not found were Korea-only releases made in Russia. Hardly mainstream releases...

I'm quite happy to accept there are bugs and issues, and we should not accept them, and should nag Meridian about them constantly, but stating that "ripping [is] a pain in the butt" is not in any way representative of my experience in the past few days of importing.

"Ripping is a pain in the butt at the moment" is a fair description in my experience.

Ripping always was a pain especially if your not dealing with "Mainstream" music.
Try Abi Moore or David Edward Booth, perhaps The Floe, Precious little information and only one cover art which I replaced with a signed one today.

This is a long job and experience has taught me to break it down to bite size chunks. Before you know it you have a great selection of music that will never need ripping again.
Then it's just topping up as you acquire.
You will gain a deep understanding of your library, something money just cannot buy.

Cheers, Chris

backup backup backup backup backup backup backup backup backup backup

MC200+MS200 plus a Teddy Pardo 12/2 LPSU for the audio endpoint.

I agree the audio and video improvements evident with the HD621 are really quite marginal. In fact one has to be using very good HDMI lead to discern any difference with the video. Audio is very slightly improved but the source plays a bigger role, at least in my experience.

What I will say is that the HD621 is a very handy connection box when handling several video sources... But it's a lot of dosh just to do that!

I was pretty miffed after buying mine, because of the very marginal improvement, but as I say I have grown used to its convenience, and I would not be without it now based on that.

Regards
Huw

Tom, the room is a converted garage, about 18 ft X 15 ft with a 7 ft square alcove off the right speaker. The room once had a thin carpet over a concrete floor and the sound was dull and uninvolving. We installed hardwood floors (cost not included in the 15%) which brought the room to life but it was too bright with reverb affecting voice frequencies. I tried lots of different Meridian gear but never got it dialed in. My last purchases: the 818 and MC200 were new; 7200 was a dealer demo sold at fire sale prices. Then, I started working with the acoustics. I still have bass issues from room modes caused by the nearly square room dimensions. I�ve enjoyed the journey with Meridian but it�s not been a straight line and it�s taken longer than necessary to get to this place!