Interestingly, I have it on good authority Meridian are probably selling more 861s now (at least this side of the pond) than ever. That surprised me, and may surprise many on here but, as Russ guessed, this forum is not representative of most of Meridian's customers, even if we're probably the most passionate and vocal about the gear! Again, not everyone wants/needs Atmos and a thousand speakers, or full-fat MQA, and then 861 is still likely the best sounding non-Atmos solution for music and movies, especially when using DSPs.

To my mind, this indicates there is still a healthy market for 861, and therefore for a v9 upgrade.

My own reasoning for a SQ upgrade right now is that, if it's just sheer engineering/R&D time which is holding back a full-on v10/862, etc., (which could be to do with full MQA processing in multichannel, etc., who knows), then at least upgrading to the latest low-jitter architecture and basic SQ of the current 818/808 would be a great incremental step in the meantime - the improvement from 818v2 to v3 was not a subtle one, in my experience.

My further reasoning is - everyone is doing stereo, no matter how well you do it (and Meridian do it sublimely for sure) it's not as much of a differentiator/USP as, e.g. Trifield/proprietary multichannel processing used to be, and could be again for them I think, in the marketplace. I guess Meridian are still aware of this(?) which is presumably why they went for Trifield in the automotive collaboration, but surely it would help them reclaim that former niche to push this a bit harder again which could only help sales.

HC: 861v4/ID40/LPS, DSP5000, DSP5000VC, DSP3100, SW1600, HD621, Oppo BDP-105, Sony VPL-HW55ES
2-Channel: Oppo BDP-105, TEAC VRDS-7/Trichord Clock 3/PSU, 551, Quad 303, Harbeth Compact 7ES-3, Kimber cables, Russ Andrews mains and supports.
Previous Meridian: 5000C, 5200SL, 7200.2, 6000, 562V.2, 568.2mm, 800v4, 808.2i, 818v2/v3, 861v8, 502