Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Meridian legacy products

Good evening,

Am I blind, or has Meridian completely ceased official support for products like Explorer, Director or even the expensive Prime? No more drivers for Windows available, for those willing to use ASIO?

At all, no more DAC’s in the medium price range? Completely new product policy? Or is it just heading for the old track, which is to provide products for the upper ten thousand?

It almost seems as if they do not want to stand by their own product history.
What a pity!

Welcome to reality.

No just the upper 9,999 I just quit! They don't mind and we don't matter.

To be fair the Explorer 2 was released about 5 years ago, the Meridian Prime almost 8 years ago and the Director is almost 9 years old. Large companies like Apple deem a product obsolete after 7 years. A smaller boutique company like Meridian would have a hard time keeping up on these lower priced items. Sure it’s disappointing but it’s business.

Interestingly all three devices mentioned in the original post are USB . If I had to guess Meridian tech support was spending the vast majority of their time and resources troubleshooting USB and driver issues that really by and large were caused by the end users computers. It was probably not a hard decision to discontinue items that were such as strain on resources. One hour of tech support on a $200.00 Explorer 2 puts you upside down really quickly.

Point taken but your comparison is suspect. Prime is a great product born of the MQA vival, apologies for the new word born before it's revival time. Apple products are not comparative and this confuses me.
Price has little to do with it, but maybe size has! Unsupported preplanned redundancy in all forms is offensive.

Edit
Just read your response Bruce and had to add the question. Where is free M Tech support available from other than from your Good Self and Rick?
Meridian divested this cost years ago.

JMPOV Hector

Apple manufactures computing devices that require hardware and software support as do the USB DACs Meridian manufacture. Their products are also all in the price range or the Meridian devices you reference. They do not support those items after 7 years. Since 2 of the 3 devices you mentioned are over 7 years old being "ignored" by Meridian is not outside of the industry standard. The Apple comparison would not be relevant if we were discussing the 5 and 6 figure components Meridian is focusing on today.

Volume not loudness

In the US Meridian still has excellent tech support who answer at any reasonable time that I call or message them.

I think future laws designed to protect the environment through a circular economy will eventually put paid to devices with planned obsolescence - at least those without an ability to recycle. There shouldn't be an ability to make something that is designed to last a year or two (or even five) and then dumped in landfill.

M do have lots of components on display in the foyer at HQ . It really was something to offer 'future-proofing' and 'software updating ' in the 1990s . The problems came later when software updates became fewer and fewer and practically dried up completely ; the promised 24/192khz speaker software update never arrived ; and the second drive bay in the 800 was never fully realised ; ultimately owners were basically barred from updating their own expensive audio kit in an age of new mobile iPods/phones/tablets all of which improve performance with software updates for several years after purchase . Trinnov on the other hand always promote their Altitude as an ongoing work in progress at war with obsolescence in order to reward customer investment . The very first Altitude 32 is still used in the lab to test any new software and has regularly won awards for best in class for basically the same machine from 2014 ( minus updated HDMI ).

So , what Meridian should have become .....

M

If Meridian are truly ending support of legacy products as mentioned in the previous emails, How's about they release schematic drawings and component specifications so that us long time owners of DSP 6000, 5000, 562v2, 500 etc can finally do our own upgrades. Such as, updating DSP 6000 to 24/96 and re-capping our own power supply boards. Sharing drivers. Any thoughts??