Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Is the 861 a dead end?

Bruce,

Have you ever tried running later cards in a v4? My belief is that those that do not work are blocked by firmware, but not for bad reasons.

As you will know, the v4 and below backplane/motherboard had some limitations which seemed to need termination cards (remember the SCSI interface for PCs?) presumably to suppress unwanted electromagnetic reflections along the backplane leading to unwanted pops and clicks.

I did not do a visual comparison of my v4 and v8 backplanes before I sold the v4, but I should have done. I have always assumed that the v6/v8 has a geometrically redesigned backplane (and perhaps the occasional carefully placed passive components) to permit operation at much higher frequencies while maintaining signal integrity and that is the reason for the incompatibility of some higher performance cards. Do you know if this is true?

And, if it is, is there any reason to think that MQA would breach some sort of limit? I presume the 8x8 use the same backplane so one presumes the 861v6 and v8 would cope as they do.