My road to M-land went through a long and tortuous path.
Being the son of Julliard Grad Concert Pianist, and audiophile, I grew up with both excellent reference gear (a Steinway concert grand in the living room) and many iterations of hi-fi from the 60`s and 70`s.
Dad had a love affair with ‘surround` since the early days of CCD time-delay systems and thoroughly adopted Quad went it came.

When I went my own way as a young adult, I was always intrigued by surround, and while I knew discreet was good (4-track reel to reel anyone?), the majority of content was on 2-ch sources (LP and CD).

So in the early 80`s I adopted a Carver C-4000 pre-amp with sonic holography and thought it was too cool. Then the first digital pre-amps came about, and since I could not afford Lexicon or Meridian at the time, I went with Sony TAE-1000ES digital, then the TAE-2000ES. The concept of DSP doing the processing and EQ was a great concept, and in those affordable units, reasonably implemented for the day (and for mass-produced units).

However, neither of those did a decent job on 2-ch to multichannel improvements.
While auditioning some Martin Logans (the one and only speaker system for me) at a dealer who also represented Meridian, I got to hear a 565 and a full digital theater speaker system (DSP5K`s if I recall). I was blown away. Not just by the great sound that kit generated as a cohesive whole, but mostly by what Trifield could do for 2-Ch audio.
If there is one thing that got me to go Meridian, it has to be Trifield processing. Yes, Dolby and DTS modes are incredible, as are some of the other modes, but nothing stands up to Trifield when fed good quality CD`s.

I first got a 565, then upgraded to my current 568. I`d keep going to a G68, except that M does too good a job, I can`t find a reason to go to a G68. I don`t need MRC, as I already ‘roll my own` DSP speakers using DBX DriveRack 260 speaker processors and fully bi-amping my Martin-Logans ( I bypass the factory passives and hand-tune my own settings). The DriveRacks let me do my own room correction in both time-alignment and in frequency EQ. So while I subscribe to the concept of DSP speakers, I happen to have a penchant for ESL that outweighs using M-DSP solutions.
Although, since Martin Logan failed to build a sufficiently powerful center, I designed and built my own. See my thread about that here ).

This final iteration of my DSP based Martin Logans (Monolith III`s and my own SL3 based Center) are my homage to Trifield. It now is truly the best sounding environment for redbook audio and for SACD/DVD-Audio.

Looking forward, I know I will always have a Meridian processor somewhere in my system .

Jonathan
My System