Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems What made you choose Meridian in the first place ?

My first experiences with Meridian were of a 200 series CD player as a student, years ago. One of my flat mates had one due to a family tie to the company. I had previously worked at Lasky's as a teenager, so I'd been into 'hifi' for a while. The Meridian player was certainly the best CD spinner I'd heard.

All that was left behind when I moved to the US and many happy years were spent with a Systemdek IIx / Linn K9, Audio Research SP6 / D40 and Spica TC50's. I bought one of the first Yamaha stereo VCR's, and routed it through the 2 channel system as a rudimentary home theatre.

As I became more interested in home theatre, I moved to a Lexicon DC1 for movies & tv, but kept the two channel set up for music. I was never completely happy with the Lexicon for music, where I found it somewhat brittle. I was mostly pretty happy with it for movies, but it started to be left behind in terms of DSP capabilities, HD video switching and room correction. I was pretty sure that I wanted room correction capability in my next processor, so that narrowed down the options a fair bit.

I read a lot of reviews, and had it narrowed down to a Lexicon MC12 and Meridian G68ADV. The Meridian held the prospect of reuniting audio and video systems, which has happened. I followed it up with a G98DH and have been very happy with the high-resolution connection (sad there aren't a few more discs available). I was also happy that the G68 was said to have a modular architecture, so that both software and hardware upgrades could allow for decent longevity. I have to say, I'm a little disppointed to hear that it doesn't look as if there will be hardware upgrades offered for the G68 (such as HDMI 1.3 allowing for high-resolution audio coming in direcly from HD-DVD or BD). I hold out hope that Meridian might reconsider this. Overall, I think Lexicon has been pretty good about offering hard and software upgrades within platform, and fairly generous upgrade programs from one program to another (though second hand prices seem to get well pummelled).

I'm not going to worry too much about that now though as there are plenty of CD's and DVD's waiting to sound and look great, which should be the case for some time to come. Diana Krall's Live in Paris is doing so right now .