Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Doody's Firstest-World Meridian-based Standing Desk

When I told one of my buddies what I was doing, I said I had "first world problems". He immediately called this monstrosity the "Firstest-world desk" and the name has stuck. Yes, I am an idiot .

No, I do not think Sir Bob designed these head units for near-field usage like this. Tough. They sound stellar like this. That said, the bass output is, well, let's use the word 'excessive' in this particular speaker setup geography. In fact, I'm VERY happy that I'm no longer planning to breed because I don't know what the output of those four inward-facing woofers are doing to my anatomy "down under", as it were!

The head units are situated so that the tweeters are at the same height as my ears when I'm standing. Each unit sits on a piece of 1/8" sorbothane which is on top of an 8" tall by 6" wide thick, glass cylinder (vase, ostensibly) filled with sand. This setup allows me to easily rotate the head units for near-field use when i'm standing, or for sitting use when I'm in the big comfy chair across the room - from which the pictures were taken. When I'm in the chair I change the "Axis" setting to its minimum (-2) and when I'm standing I set Axis to zero. Not entirely sure it helps, but in theory it does.

Special thanks to our dearest Ian who was able to make me two longer cables to replace the factory base-unit-to-head-unit XLR connections. Couldn't have done it without ya, dude!!!!

And while we're at it, a special "no thanks" to all y'all for not being able to get a Hitchhiker brother an old-school S control cable - I just soldered up my own.

On the floor between the units is an old ExactPower power reconditioning unit I also had lying about in storage (a pair of them, in fact). I live in a house built in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and although the fuse box has been replaced with circuit breakers - the wiring is of very questionable quality and era - and the speakers I was using before this desk got a LOT of interference on them - which I always guessed might be power-related. Not a single odd noise with the EP in place, thankfully.

On top of the EP unit is an i5 Windows laptop that runs my Roon core, among other things. The laptop feeds a Wyred4Sound digital-audio-out box via USB that connects to input 1 of the DSP6000s. Roon converts DSD to PCM and upsamples or downsamples as required to 24/96. In addition, the laptop is wired into a Chord Hugo 2 headphone DAC/amp that feeds my Senn HD800s when I want to stay in the neighborhood's good graces, or my Shure SE846s when I want to stay in the good graces of SWMBO (my office is just across the hall from the kids' room!).

I've been enjoying the heck out of this setup. It was a lot of fun to put it all together and it's great fun (and great listening) to work at.

Thought y'all might be amused at my insanity!

Xoxo,
Doody