Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Jerrys Theater Pictures

Also keep in mind that it's not the end of the world keeping a couple bad frequencies you rarely hit in trade for not spoiling impact from other more common frequencies. A little decay is ok. And even your 262 does show significant improvement.

If you don't hear any bad frequencies over a wide range a material then that trumps the waterfall chart. You could also try a frequency sweep. But be carefull with all that power. When you hit a bad frequency you'll know it, it sounds awefull. I use a few BlueMan tunes to test with.

And one other thing is to consider setting DSP's to Wall instead of Corner and see how that all tunes out. But I think MRC alone gives you enough control to clean it up only where needed.

Don't shoot for a perfect looking waterfall, because it's a rathole you'll never get out of.

Anyway it sounds like your getting the hang of it. You'll probably be asking about RTA any day now :-).

All I can say is thank you fellas. I am stunned. I feel like Ive been driving a wonderful Ferrari for years but all Ive been doing is driving it straight. Now you all talked me into driving school and I know how to corner with it! I am going slow so I did not want to completely redo what the auto MRC did. My goal is to tweak it. So I had 5 filters open. I decided I would focus on the front 3 speakers as the rears and sides when it comes to bass are doing LFE and thats ok if its a little bombastic. I found some peaks in the 30-40hz range that I bumped down. I decided I wanted to use 2 new filters per channel- so I looked around and found a filter at 130hz which was pretty benign on a surround channel- so I deleted it and used this for one of my mains. I also found smaller bumps in the 80hz range. So I bumped those down too. Great idea to see the waterfall and the profile at the same time- by manipulating all the variables I was able to smooth things out.

So thats the technical side. What counts is the sound. Whoa!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What sound!!!!!!!!!!!!

I started off with an old favorite: Joshua Redman's Moodswing- a nice Jazz CD from the mid 90s. Joshua Redman is a saxophone player and a long time ago this album helped me through lawschool. There is a lot of acoustic bass with good energy to it on the first track. Using my non tweaked, auto only MRC this sounded great- far better than bypass. Then I try the tweaked settings- how can that be? Ive kept all the good stuff and all the bad stuff is either minimized or gone! Theres a live track on this album called "heading home"- I felt like I was there- it was so honest- the bottom of the bass, what I call the foundation- is there but its so much tighter now- theres no overhang to it as there was before. I am really impressed with the results here.

So I decide to move on- I fire up the new Rush Album- Snakes and Arrows. First track is called "Far Cry". The sound is crystal clear, yet full, attacking, exactly what Rush should be. I heard things on this I have yet to hear in any environment. There is an instrumental on this album that is perhaps their finest- thats saying something for a band thats been playing as long as they have. The whole album is fantastic and I think its possibly their best album ever. With the old automatic only MRC settings the sound was still great but the very bottom was a little bit sloppy- with this music it didn't matter so much- but it was there- slightly obscuring little bass details. Whats interesting is when you obscure details at one place in the sound, details in other places are either obscured or seem to be obscured.

Now it was time to try my boom boom test so I fired up Kayne West's new Graduation album. Pretty good album btw. Amazing results by MRC+tweaking. With the auto settings, the boominess is really too much. With the tweaking the energy and power are there but without the overhang. Its powerful without being heart stopping or headache inducing. I think the bass they put on some of these albums is so overdone that no one can hear what it would sound like in the studio- except us fortunate Meridian owners of course

I decided to take a detour to an older recording. When I first setup the system I was disappointed that one of my favorite albums just didn't sound dynamic or cohesive on it. Well, today was liberation day for Abbey Road. What a fantastic sound. I feel like I have a new and exciting way of experiencing my entire music collection.

Listened to a little of the Foo Fighters and also Maroon 5s new albums- same results. Tried a movie or two but forgot to use the tweaked settings- I would expect the sound to be a little "faster" sounding- overall, if you will pardon the cliche- I am blown away- like that guy in the Maxell cassette poster from the late 70's / early 80's. Truly an iconic image- if that guy had a Meridian system, the poster would have been in color and 3D!



WOWOWOWOW- THANK YOU GUYS FOR PUSHING ME!!!

best regards,
Jerry

This is a limitation of MRC (and room to some extent) rather than some intellectual limitation. After a lot of work my curves are actually pretty smooth, or as smooth as I can get them with MRC - I ran out of adjustment power while keeping my number of filters under the minimum required not to eat into lipsync delay. I ended up using the BASS control at -5 to further adjust the curves to my desired output and am now considering the boundary settings too. This is something I miss from my TacT box - there you simply draw the desired curve and the processor hits it...

I agree that a few lumps or bumps here and there aren't really too big of a problem (and dips even less so) unless they also happen to interact with room modes. Jerry's lumps though span that very frequently used lower bass area and would be audible most of the time - even dialogue will hit those frequencies - voiceover man would sound tremendous though!

Mark

Mark,
Im surprised the Radiance box doesnt have lipsync delay. The CII has that... It also has an annoying habit of losing cadence lock for 24/48hz output I don't know if anyone makes something, but I am sure someone makes a relatively low cost box that would allow you to control lipsync. Then you could get more filters and still have some M lipsync ability to fine tune if needed.

best regards,
Jerry

Jerry, I do have an external lipsync box available, but that means passing digital data through yet another box leading to potential issues with formats or jitter - something I'd rather avoid. It's a shame that the 861 is limited this way.

Radiance will ensure audio and video arrive at the same time, other than that it's not really the job of a video processor to handle addition lip sync delays? I'm not using the Radiance in my cinema yet as 48Hz output is not yet added.

Mark

Mark, if the Radiance is causing the audio and video to be in sync then isn't it already doing some lip sync processing?

best regards,
Jerry

Sure, but not in any way in which the user can interact and it's only in sync in relation to how it went into the Radiance - delays elsewhere in the chain will be propagated. HDMI is confronting video processors with audio for the first time and it's not unreasonable to expect that the video processor passes the audio without causing any (delay) issues?

Mark

But if the VP is introducing delay- is that any different from a user specified delay? I think in my setup my HD discs are via the CII but the Kscape is direct to the 861 because I was worried about jitter for music which also comes out of the Kplayer. Ill have to peep my head in there to look- been a little while. Btw- Im not using the HDMI audio- Im using the coax audio.

best regards
Jerry

I think we're getting stuck on semantics. The audio processor's lip sync is there to compensate for the entire chain delay from source to display and is adjustable. The video processors delay is there simply to ensure that the video processor doesn't add any delay to the audio chain and is fixed... so it isn't lipsync in the same sense as the audio processor's lipsync but rather it's simply a transparent part of the design.

Mark

Mark, are you saying the video processor is not touching the audio in any way but somehow adjusting the video to compensate for any delay the processing introduces?

best regards,
Jerry

No, the opposite; the Radiance will adjust the audio if necessary to ensure that it comes out of the processor synced with the video.

Mark

So here is my confusion. If the audio goes through the processor, and if the processor delays the audio, whats the difference from a purity of the chain/ jitter/ stand point if the processor does this automatically or allows the user to adjust it? Just trying to understand- I could understand if you want to simply go from the source to the processor.

best regards,
Jerry