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

Wow- what a great thread. I'm really enjoying reading this (actually I read most of it over the past several days).

In my case, like just about everyone I started out as a youngster being interested in anything electronic and thus, anything that reproduced audio or video. And a big influence was, of course, Star Wars. I remember trying to do a kind of "poor-man's" surround sound by simply running a second set of speakers off the stereo I got when I was 13. I tried putting the speakers in the four corners of my room- you can imagine the result- it wasn't as good as when the speakers were just two in their traditional positions. But those are the follies- and fun- of being 13- and there are others which we will not get into here .

The next big change for me was when I was out of college and I had saved enough to buy a Yamaha DPL receiver and some Infinity Kappa speakers. The source was DPL VHS. Star Wars never looked or sounded better. This was back in 94.

Then I discovered LD. Right around this time DD was coming to the home and I picked up some B&K separates. I got a used pioneer LD player and I forget whose demod- I actually think it was a Lexicon- did they make demods?- It worked well enough. The B&K did not have DTS nor THX re-eq. As I discovered more I discovered that my infinity kappas were ok speakers, but not terrific and I discovered that the movie soundtracks were too bright with out the THX re-eq. I also wanted to check out DTS. I forget who made it, but there was a company who made a DTS decoder that could be inserted into the chain if you had separates. This all worked fine but I was annoyed that I could not time align the DTS and the whole affair was too cobbled together for my tastes. I had also been reading up on some audio processors winning a lot of praise- in particular the Lexicon (DC-1) and the Meridian (I think then it was the 565). In the end I was able to get a great deal on the DC-1 and the Meridian dealer was unable to get me any kind of pricing improvement. I kept my B&K amp. The DC-1 was fine but it really lacked any musicality. In an attempt to improve its musicality I replaced the kappa speakers with Aerial 10Ts- great speakers btw. And then I swapped out the amp for a proceed high power amp- those 10Ts need A LOT of power. It still wasn't musical enough for me and by this time the MC-1 was coming out and Lexicon had a fantastic trade in program which I made use of. The MC-1 was more musical, but yet again, I felt it just didn't have enough ability with music.

So I traded it for an 861 v2- this was 1999. I was fortunate and I my wife and I were discussing building a home theater with living quarters, otherwise known by non- HT people as "a house" I wanted a home theater and we did the planning for it and my initial plan was to use the Aerial speakers with custom amps fed by balanced cables from the 861 in the control room which is about 30' (linear) away- so that would be more than 30' of cable, maybe 45' or so to be safe. My wife and I were at CES in 2001 and we heard the 8000s and we were literally blown away. These speakers had everything I prize, clarity, imaging, and most of all dynamics. Also in the 18 months or so since I purchased my 861, a strange thing happened to my "serial upgrade-itis": it abated- at least when it came to the processor. I felt the 861 was the pinnacle for someone who wants to do it all in one box. What hooked me - and still does- is the performance. But when I also considered the ease of having the full on digital theater I went for it and in so far as the audio side is concerned we have had the DSP speakers and 800 since 2003 and have never felt the need to upgrade or change them. The 861 since 1999 and that has just been upgraded to the latest version, and I will continue to do so.

My opinion, and this could be applied to anything- any product at least- is there are many people who could lay out the current state of the art specs and build you something that would be state of the art today. But, there are very few who understand the art of balancing the trade offs of all these items in a way that makes a product produce a result that is pleasing today and well into the future. They understand the technology so well that they know where to push and where to hold back.

IMHO, Meridian is that rare artist that can make this balance and do it with exquisite precision. I am a very happy customer and beyond that I highly respect them.

best regards,
Jerry