Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Will Meridian survive?

Yes, but manufacturing ability isn't.

Given the parlous state of manufacturing in the U.K. think of a future Meridian as like Dolby Labs. They don't make equipment. They are a think tank which licenses their ideas to the (mostly Far Eastern) manufacturers.

I ready to send money M's way just as soon as they release their HDMI box!

Mark

+1
Just ordered a Popcornhour to have a toy for Christmas

I hope its worth the wait because as other threads have shown , not everyone is willing to wait for the M solution .

~M~

Right now M should refocus to really high end early adopters and find something they "need". M should be looking to do a full on retail strategy and the downtimes could help because they could get in for cheap rents. But first, they need to go back to what they can do and make sure to do it- selling F80s at Saks 5th Ave won't do it. They need locations to showcase the entire digital theater- soup to nuts. The typical Saks customer is going to think: overpriced clock radio. JMHO. Btw- I'm not a "hater" just disappointed that M is in the position its in. Nice people with terrific products.

In The Times (London) Magazine (colour supplement) there is a regular page called Men's Stuff. It is aimed at the stereotype male (emotionally retarded and intellectually challenged) with more money than sense. It features male perfume, clothes, gadgets, adventure stories etc. It also assesses whether a famous male "can dress" ie well or badly. The criteria are never clear, and this week the person being gratuitously insulted is Robert Plant.

And this week, in amongst all this stuff is a Meridian 808.2.

Is this a triumph of Meridian marketing or will their name be sullied by association? I suppose all publicity is good publicity. Only a contact phone number is given rather than refer the reader to the now rather good website, complete with up to date news (well done Meridian for the latter).

M or Grahams HiFi can't be too hard up as I just got a very nice colour flyer about 7200's and Speakerlink in the post (admittedly 2nd class) that was personalised to me. If money was tight, I am sure they could have used a cheaper technique.

Also to note, but possibly already mentioned, it looks like the M CAT5 cable is non standard. Each twisted pair seems to be in its own outer sheath rather than bundled as one. I wonder if there is more to aesthetics to this, possibly allowing TP's to be easily separated from the main bundle and separately terminated.

The news page has been updated with New Year Ces promises :

http://www.Meridian-audio.com/news.aspx

Is the beast being stirred into action at last ?

~M~

What chance a leak before Christmas to cheer us all up ?

And note the hint that they expect to be very busy (though they are not going to say they expect things to be quiet).

Ian:

That doesn't make much sense from the signal rejection standpoint. You can run Cat6 at 100m unshielded and still get full 350 MHz performance per pair. If I can run 1GB/second what's that equivalent to in the audio world? 32 bits at 32 MHz?

Even 10 channels, 24bits @ 192K only comes out to 46 Mbits /second which can run across Cat (not Cat5e or Cat6) at 100m with no problems.

I'm not saying you're wrong; just that it doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense from a technical perspective.

John:

Not quite sure what you are on about. Just pointing out that the M CAT5 cable appears to be 4 separate and separable sets of twisted pairs and was wondering if there was some reason for this - even if its to allow them to be laid side by side providing a flat cable with enough room to write Meridian across it.

I did however make the uninitiated broad assumption that each TP was autonomous and that there may be some merit in separating them.

Shielding at least the audio twisted pair makes sense for RF rejection. CAT5 is 100 ohm cable. The AES standard for balanced digital is 110 ohm shielded twin-axial. My understanding is that impedance mismatch can cause jitter, but I guess 100 ohm is close enough to 110 ohm to work. However, since the idea is for installers to be able to wire with standard CAT5, using special CAT5 with shielded twisted pairs sounds a bit like belt and suspenders. I bet it's really nice cable though.

Ian:

I'm saying I don't see a technical reason for splitting the cables out into discrete twisted pairs is my point.