Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Meridian at Bristol

From the What Hi-Fi site I see that they are using a G68 and 7200 system with a laptop and Sony Blu player for their dems. No mention of the HD621 but I assume there must be one in there somewhere!

Bob gave a nice music only dem today
808.12,Sooloos,2 D8ks.
He outlined M philosophy and speaker construction
Played 6 samples from disc and drive and outlined Sooloos advantages
No MRC and no Trifield
Piano and voice, voice, cello piano,ensemble (DG recording to dem apodising filters ability to clean up early recordings ) and the Floyd for fun.
The HDMI device was upstairs
There may be SPDIF version in the future.....
Roger

why a SPDIF version ?

What did Bob say were the advantages of the Sooloos and did he say anything about its future direction??

Went to the show today, Meridian demo was ok, What HiFi demo was a let down (verging on outright disgrace), the rest of the show pretty typical (and not inspiring).

Bob's demo of the DSP8k, 808i2 and Sooloos was as per post above. Bob implied replaygain from the Sooloos during the talk so I asked him about it. It looks like part of the "special sauce" Meridian will be adding is SmartLink info and the replay gain information should be passed to the processor/speakers, thus keeping the digital signal unchanged and applying the volume adjustment in the usual M way. Pretty uneventful and not the arena to demonstrate the interactivity of the Sooloos and as much it just sounded like any other digital source. Once upstairs on the other stand, you could play with the software. This was much more fun to play. As many other people have said, it is (understatement) nice, I just don't know about several grand nice (for someone who enjoys the geeky elements of file storage, meta tagging, etc.). M are working a new skin and should start their push once this is done.

The What Hifi demonstration was very weird. They were trying to demonstrate the benefits of music servers and some of the pitfalls (that you should avoid). First up, iTunes playing MP3 128kbps from laptop headphone output to G68 to 5xDSP7k2 (though I didn't spend time checking the rears and the center was of the H variety) + SW1600. It didn't sound that great, as they were trying to prove. Next up, Apple lossless out of the digital output from the laptop to a Bryston DAC to the G68 and speakers. No you're not out of your minds (and please stop screaming at the back) they really did include a totally spurious D-A A-D stage in the loop. Yep, they have a Meridian digital processor with DSP speakers and they still thought having the additional analog stage was a good idea. (For what it's worth, their demo sounded worse than my SqueezeBox receiver straight into 18bit DSP5ks that I have in the bedroom, let alone the magic of MCR and a full digital theater.) I asked them about it after the demo and they said it was because they wanted to stress that you should have an external DAC off your PC to go to traditional systems. While I don't disagree with that, I think it's incredibly niave and condescending to the audience. Can anybody name a modern processor / amp that doesn't have digital inputs? Why not take the opportunity to tell the world about doing digital systems properly? The purpose of their demo was to demonstarte the pitfalls you can avoid with music servers and then they go and break the cardinal rule of messing with the original source bits and then hold this up as an ideal. I digress, but I'm not convinced they knew about the joys of Windows mixer either. Very poor demonstration of music servers and if I was a vinyl head it would have done nothing to convince me. (If anyone else is visiting the show, and bothers with this demo, please ASK about this, apparently they're keeping a tally because they didn't think most people would notice / care!)

Next up, was the new Denon Blu-ray player going via the HD621 and demoing some magician, rabbit and hat cartoon from Pixar on a Panasonic 103" 9 series plasma. Nice picture, but that really shouldn't be an issue with digitally sourced animation. The sound didn't do as much as I was hoping for. Does anyone know if this is even a lossless soundtrack (I think it comes from the Wall-E Blu-Ray)? So this was fine, if taking a great system and throwing it a fat pitch to hit out the park rather than smoking the corners (Brits, this is a baseball analogy).

I got some time to talk to (Saint) Des. He's convinced that the HD621 is due at the end of the month (yes February, I probably should have asked for confirmation of year too, but he seemed genuine ;-)). They already have orders for more than 450 so it will probably take a while to fill all of them. If you've not ordered yet, this may take you into March and beyond as apparently dealers seem to love them, particularly for their demo rooms. No chance of an audition, but they like how it cleans up jitter. Still no luck with just getting one HDMI input for LCPM audio on an 861 card though.

FINALLY we are moving in the right direction !!! That is great news and Meridian can finally leverage their technology with state of the art. For some folks this is a huge plus going with an all Meridian solution.

I assume you mean Presto? It has a 448kbps DD track.

Des said no plan for 7.1 card as Hollywood dose not support True 7.1
WhatHIFI Demo Panasonic 103" Denon Bluray & HD621 very good picture

Pioneer Big Discount on 60"



Mike

At the moment you can only retro fit apodising filter via HDMI source
New components will feature it
Apoding must be near the source
This may change in the future for earlier components (500)
I asked Bob about normalising levels as he was riding gain all the time from the Sooloos.
He said it was within the M philosophy and contained in the server.
It did not reduce information
Meta data was detailed
The DG dem was good a "glassy" 80's recording sounded smooth and warm but detailed
Roger

Can you elaborate?
Thanks,

Ed.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Replaygain

If all they were really touting is replaygain, then I guess it will be quite some time before Meridian does anything to Sooloos that will actually improve the audio performance of the server. I think it makes sense not to expect anything major at this stage. Maybe by early 4th quarter, because they will probably want to evaluate software improvements before considering expensive hardware improvement possibilities. And if the product is selling well under the current configuration, they wouldn't want to announce anything major that could stall sales momentum.

Ed 2k for 60" and free 32 LCD 50" �1500



Mike