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My day at Meridian.
I’m lucky enough to own a few (slightly elderly) bits of Meridian kit. So from time to time; I checkout a forum for meridian owners. In 2007 Meridian invited fifty members over to their HQ for a visit. By all accounts all the attendees had a wonderful time. I was determined that if the opportunity ever arose again; that this time I wouldn’t miss out.
Luckily I had a chance to attend another visit as Meridian kindly decided to repeat the exercise last Friday.
Meridian HQ Visit
As you may or may not know; Meridian are pioneers in digital electronics; making the worlds first ‘audiophile’ CD player, and developing the concept of active speakers. Their processors are second to none and I would say that they are the only company to use DSP (digital signal processing) correctly. In recent years; they have developed a high end scaler and projector, produced the acclaimed F80 portable music device and developed Meridian Lossless Packing the lossless compression system used for DVD-Audio and is now the core of Dolby TruHD as used on Blu-ray.
I arrived at Meridian HQ to find another forty nine Meridianophiles in the reception area and we were all treated to breakfast before the very busy day that was ahead of us.
Firstly we entered their training room to hear a talk by company founder and world authority on digital electronics Bob Stuart. Bob talked about the company philosophy about trying to recreate as accurately as possible the sound of live music and compared the craft of speaker manufacture to that of instrument makers. He showed a picture of a Meridian DSP speaker and a grand piano; pointing out that they were both fine musical instruments but the DSP speaker could also ‘play’ the flute! Once we were given an insight into the company and what they were trying to achieve we were split up into groups so we could all go to various ‘sessions’ to try and cover as much ground as possible.
My group was taken back to the reception area and were given a demonstration of the company’s top end CD player (the 808.2) and their top end speakers the 8000’s.
The reception area is a large glass covered area and frankly the acoustics are awful; so I wasn’t expecting too much from this demo despite the pedigree of the components. Bob Stuart joined us again to conduct the demonstration. Firstly we were played a piece of Piano music. Wow! It was like having a piano several feet in front of you. Then followed a jazz piece; including vocal music performed by Cleo Lane’s daughter. Again this was awesome. The imaging was precise; but for me the most impressive thing was the dynamics. There was no ‘overhang’ in the sound. It was precise and correct.
Finally we concluded with some Pink Floyd, Bob put on a couple of tracks from The Wall: "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1", "The Happiest Days of our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2".
It was absolutely, stunningly remarkable. The bass impact was incredible. It was ‘tight’ and not at all ‘woolly’ as might be heard from lesser speakers.
Remarkably, as this was piece of studio recorded music; you could feel the sense of acoustic space was reduced. The sound of the ‘helicopter’ at the beginning of one of the tracks was so good; you could honestly believe that one was flying over head!
That concluded the first session – not a bad start!
The next ‘session’ was called R&D Listening and was conducted by Meridian’s head of product development Richard Hollingshead. It was in special listening room which had obviously been acoustically treated. Richard outlined how some products came into being and that the development path wasn’t always as clear cut as people believed. He then talked about the Meridian i80 Ipod talk.
He mentioned that the component layout maximized the sound quality and that there was a very narrow gap on the circuit board that made manufacture difficult, but was there as it was vital to sound quality of the finished unit. Then we concluded by listening to music off the i80 into some Meridian active speakers – very good quality; though far short of what we had just heard. It was interesting and informative session.
No time to lose; we were ushered into our next session in the Meridian Theatre room – this was the session I had been looking forward to!
What you couldn’t miss was the Meridian 810 projector:
and their 810 reference video scaler
The projector is enormous! There is no hiding this baby it’s more than two feet wide, two and a half feet long and one foot high. Roland; the man taking this session said that it was expected that this projector would normally be in a ‘anteroom’ in a typical install but was kept in the theatre for training purposes.
Meridian is clearly thinking of the future here as the projector/scaler combo is a ten mega pixel device. Is that impressive? Well bear in mind that Blu-ray is 1080 x 1900 pixels i.e. Blu-ray is a two mega pixel format; so it has to be scaled up dramatically with this projector. Even 4k2k material wouldn’t make full use of this PJ’s ability!
The screen was apparently nine foot wide; though it seemed much larger to me. All the material we were shown was in 16:9 aspect ratio – there was no ‘widescreen’ demo sadly.
First up was a clip of a Norah Jones concert recorded from BBC HD. This was obviously not 1080p so was scaled up even more than Blu-ray would be.
It was amazing!
The sheer detail on screen; her face the microphone cage was just incredible. There was real sense of depth to the picture. There were some compression artifacts visible but that was from the original broadcast. Truly and incredibly stunning.
Next up was a scene from Apocalypto on Blu-ray. Oh, and they were using a Playstation 3 as the source – so not many problems with loading discs then!
My god, this was incredible. I mean the last clip was incredible; but this was even more incredible!
The level of detail in the picture was astounding, the colour accuracy was phenomenal but the sheer most breath taking thing was the sense of depth of the picture. It’s very hard to describe, but everything has the right amount of ‘space’ around it. You may not be aware of it; but when you watch something on lesser displays the image is slightly ‘flattened’. On this projector, the sense of space was just right – not in a artificial 3D sense – so much so you felt as if you could walk into the picture.
Finally, we were treated to the opening robbery scene from the Dark Knight, that scene was shot in Imax and also looked fantastic, though I have to say that the digitally shot Apocalypto was more impressive.
I have seen another PJ (the SIM HT5000) which is probably almost as impressive as this beast and has a little more ‘punch’ to picture than the Meridian, but the Meridian picture was just so right….
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Whilst this PJ is based upon JVC derived DILA panels; it certainly isn’t a rebadged PJ at a hugely inflated price. The lens assembly is a work of art with one of the lens elements needing three months to cool before it can be laser ground! It also uses a Xenon lamp.
Oh, and I totally forgot – the audio was just amazing as well!
Sadly; we had to tear ourselves away from the theatre room and onto the next session.
Meridian recently acquired US music media/server company Sooloos and we were about to see the first fruits of their joint efforts. No I’m rather computerphobic and whilst I see the benefits of storing your media on a PC and streaming it around the house; I can also see the pitfalls. Frankly this is something I wasn’t too excited about.
Our host for this session was Enno from the original Sooloos company. The main point of attraction is the large control 10 touchpad.
So this looks like a large touch pad for controlling your music library. So far, so normal. But Enno explained that what differentiated this from its competitors is the sheer amount of Metadata the system stored. In addition to titles and artists names, every other aspect of a recording was stored. For example if you were playing an album and thought ‘that was a good piece of guitar playing’ you could ‘touch’ (what’s the touchpad equivalent of ‘click’? ) on the guitarists name and instantly be given a list of other albums he has played on in your collection. You could select albums by genre rather than title and if you know the difference between ‘Jazz’ and ‘Hard Bob’ you’ll appreciate the benefit of it. Not expecting to be impressed, I was. We concluded with a hands on of the interface.
It was time for a sumptuous lunch provided by Meridian where all of us awestruck visitors could chat amongst ourselves.
After lunch our next session consisted of a tutorial ‘how to get the best from your Meridian set up’ that was taken by Des Ford head of tech support and Dr Rhonda Wilson Meridian’s had of research. Obviously this session was very specific to Meridian product owners; but it was remarkable that any company would wheel out its ‘big guns’ to help owners of their products get the benefit of their knowledge.
Finally the last ‘event’ of the day was a question and answer session from Bob Stuart and the rest of the Meridian team. I can’t imagine that the management of any other a/v company would make their top staff available to answer questions from their customers.
Meridian is a secretive company; and they don’t talk about future plans or products at all. That sometimes leads to frustrations among product owners; but this session (and indeed the whole day) helped reassure people that the company has a ‘roadmap’ – even if they won’t share it with us. The handing out of ‘goodie bags’ and group photo concluded our day at Meridian HQ.
A few of us headed to a local pub for a quick thirst quench and some munchies and some more chatting before heading homeward.
It was a great day out and I’d like to thank Nick for organizing it, my friend Chris for driving, all my fellow ‘hitch hikers’ and most of all Meridian for hosting it.
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Originally Posted by Max Payne
