Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems CES 2007 Hitchhiker's Q&A with Meridian

John,

Thanks for doing this again. I would be interested in Bob's thoughts on the following:

Bob mentioned last year that he was surprised by a couple of problems/ideas raised in your questions. Whilst I recognize that this forum represents a minority of Meridian customers, it probably has a disproportionate number of those that are pushing to explore the limits of product capabilities. There are also more than a few folks with a technological understanding that is likely way beyond the norm of Meridian users. It could be a commercial mistake for Meridian to respond to ideas from this forum with the assumption that this reflects the broader interests of the market. However, it is precisely user groups like this that can ask about capabilities that the typical user doesn't know they need/want (yet).

If I were in Bob's seat, I think that I'd ask one of the tech support, development or market research folks to visit the forum periodically (once every 1-2 weeks?) I would ask of the forum that there be two sticky threads:

1. Technical Questions for Meridian
2. Product Suggestions and Requests for Meridian

The former being a spot to place questions that we don't seem to be able to resolve within the community. I think this could be a good organized source of ideas for improvement.

3. Would Meridian allow the forum to have access to electronic versions of their manuals to post on the forum. I would like to see an arrangement similar to Wikipedia whereby forum members could post enhancements, with peer or moderated edits. I assume we'd all be happy with Meridian then using whichever pieces it saw fit in their official versions.
4. Any plans that Meridian might have for enhancement of MRC. In particular, I would like to see: (a) automation of speaker distances and size settings, (b) automatic testing of a range of different crossover settings to see which results in the 'best' response prior to MRC and (c) if it included room dimensions, suggested initial speaker placement (within constraints) and movement. EVOP from statistical design of experiments (Box, Hunter & Hunter) could be incorporated for iteration provided a suitable objective function could be defined. It would seem that this might be realistic for subwoofer placement, at least.

Cheers, Ian