Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Meridian UHD722 Trade-up promotion announced

It sounds like it wouldn't compromise your system but for me and I expect a number of people that have bought into the Meridian philosophy, will feel that it is a compromise. If your preference is video rather than music then it may be less important.

This exert is from meridian-digital-signal-processing-dsp-path-white-paper

Digital audio technology is now widely regarded by industry experts as the best means to hear music in the home. Because music recorded digitally can be transmitted, even over long distances, and played back with no change from the original, like Morse code over a telegraph line.

Why is this important? Traditional analogue systems behave much like the childhood game in which each player repeats a whispered message into the next player’s ear, and so on down a chain. Each analogue link – turntable, amplifier, cable, speaker – whispers an analogy of what it hears to the next, but something is always lost or added. What emerges at the end, while charming, may not resemble the original message.

By contrast, digital audio first encodes music as digits – ones and zeros – in patterns describing specific sound waves. This is the binary language of computers, and it’s very difficult to mistake a one for a zero. No matter how long the chain, at its end, digital equipment listens only for patterns of those two digits, which it reassembles into music, ignoring all other whispered information as noise. Hence the crystal clarity of good digital sound: no detail lost, no noise added.

Paramount among audiophile truths is that music’s electronic journey to our ears should be as short and unadorned as possible; this preserves the fragile nuances of live performance. This is why, for example, audiophiles have long rejected analogue tone controls, correctly seeing them as electrical mazes where musical subtleties are lost or rearranged.

Yet the typical ‘purist hi-fi’ is hardly pure. Rather, it’s a confusion of components with varying reactive properties, tangled together through a rat’s nest of electrically whimsical cables. Each piece lengthens the path and damages delicate harmonic, phase and other relationships that contour music. The amusing irony is, these boxes and cables are generally assembled for tone control: each piece chosen for how its voice changes the message. Why not simply replace the whole corrupt chain with one transparent digital link, particularly if the music source is digital already?

At Meridian, that’s exactly what we did. In essence, we decided to convert the signal from a source into digital form as early as possible and at the highest level of quality (if it wasn’t already), then maintain that signal in digital form as long as possible before converting back to analogue (although the part of our hearing system from middle ear to brain is actually digital, analogue pressure waves carry the sound from a loudspeaker, through the air, to the ear). So in a complete Meridian system, the signal is only converted from digital to analogue immediately before it enters the amplifier.

Cheers
Tom