The press on Meridian’s CD players…
Meridian CD Player
“…a breakthrough for CD players. …[Soundstage] is where the Meridian renders the competition irrelevant and worthless.”
—The Absolute Sound, Winter 1985
Meridian Pro-MCD
“I suspect that [the Meridian Pro-MCD] will be the first CD player to be regarded as a ‘classic’!”
—Hi-Fi News & Record Review, Feb 1986
Meridian 207
“The original Pro-MCD set the benchmark in its day, but the 207-Pro was the radical step, placing Meridian for all time in the CD player hall of fame.”
—Hi-Fi Choice, June 1990
“There is nothing else on the market remotely like the Meridian 207… It is…one of the finest-sounding CD players on the market.”
—Sydney Morning Herald, Aug 1988
Meridian 602/606
“In Meridian we might be looking at a company that has a real contribution to make towards raising CD performance.”
—Audiophile, June 1991
“…the 602 [via the 606] was damn near impossible to fault… Its resolution of the subtlest treble details was intricate to the point of being exquisite… the 602/606 turned out to be a very ‘special’ combination.” —Hi-Fi Choice, July 1991
Meridian 508
“…the Meridian 508.24…the world’s best single-box player and used as a reference machine by renowned US publication Stereophile… brings out aspects of music that most players can merely hint at…” —Audio & Video Lifestyle, 1999
“…the 508.24’s measured performance reveals that Bob Stuart and his talented digital design team have done a fabulous job.”
—Stereophile, May 1998
Meridian 800
“…the 800 is perhaps the finest overall CD player I’ve ever laid ears on. When you consider that there are some CD-only players round that demand this outlay, the price tag doesn’t seem all that eye-watering… Takes audio to another level…. Without doubt the
finest optical disc playing system we’ve encountered.” —HiFi World, December 2002
“…I found that the Meridian… was clearly superior… not just to my reference components, but to any other CD front ends that I’ve auditioned or reviewed.…
The performance of Meridian’s 800/861 with CDs is superior to the performance you get with the great majority of SACDs
and DVD-As through any player.” —Absolute Sound, December 2003
Meridian 808
“The 808 is worth every penny asked for it. …this deck is head and shoulders above almost everything else
I have ever heard. It’s beautiful, well built and sounds wonderful… After listening to this player for the last three months at least six (sometimes 10-12) hours a day, I’m still as infatuated with it as the day it arrived.
The main thing is that the Meridian 808 is an extremely musical player that gets it right on all levels.”
Why the 808?
Meridian decided to introduce the 808 Signature Reference Compact Disc Player for several reasons. We have been both surprised and pleased by increasing levels of interest in our popular G Series CD players: this tells us that there is a strong element of listeners who do not want pictures or complications attached to their music enjoyment, and wish to take advantage of the extensive selection that is available on no medium, to date, other than Compact Disc.
Thus the 808.2 is offered as an exquisite CD-only player, embodying the very best of our art and technology. And the 808.2 is a ‘signature’ model – each one hand-signed by Meridian’s founders, Robert Stuart and Allen Boothroyd.
Meridian’s 808.2 is the latest in a series of optical disc players that use a specially- selected ROM drive for reading. The ROM drive allows multiple passes to be made, ensuring that the correct data are recovered from the disc and improving Compact Disc’s error-correction a hundredfold. It also allows complete buffering of the recovered data.
To ensure the lowest possible jitter, 808.2 incorporates an entirely new clocking regime and employs three buffers, two of which are used as FIFOs in a completely redesigned buffering environment.
By the time the data is passed to the DACs or the digital output, the jitter is incredibly low – in fact 808.2 has the lowest jitter we have ever measured on a CD player: even better than the original 808’s 90 picoseconds, with the jitter spectrum held below 0.1Hz.
The signal path includes proprietary error correction and concealment, and Meridian’s acclaimed ‘Resolution Enhancement’ DSP, in which the original 44.1kHz, 16-bit audio is upsampled to 176.4kHz, 24-bit in a new 150MIPs processor operating with
48-bit internal precision. This is ‘true’ DSP upsampling, completely redesigned for the
808.2and unlike anything else available in the marketplace. This upsampling allows conversion-related filtering to take place far above the limits of human hearing, so there are no artefacts added to the sound – simply the pure music.
The 808.2 employs the latest, exquisite multi-bit over-sampled delta-sigma D/A converters, combined with a matching proprietary analogue output stage of the highest quality, completely redesigned for the 808.2.
Delivering the promise of CD The new model includes many other new features, including the RJ45-based SpeakerLink interfacing system, allowing
adirect single-cable link from the 808.2 to Meridian DSP speakers via convenient, easily-installed CAT-5 cabling. But the most significant is the new, proprietary digital filter system developed by Meridian and included for the first time in the new 808.2.
High-resolution audio prefers sample rates and bit depths higher than the 44.1kHz 16- bit CD format. For this reason our top-end CD players have incorporated resolution enhancement that includes upsampling.
808.2perfectly upscales its outputs to 176.4kHz and 24 bits, significantly improving the sound.
But upsampling alone cannot improve on one aspect of CD: the original sampling rate of the recording. Digital audio captures sound up to half the sample rate and
you have to filter out any meaningless information above that frequency (22kHz in the case of CD).
Traditionally, the steep filters required to do this job have audibly degraded the sound. The earliest analogue filters caused enormous phase shifts at high frequencies, and with digital linear-phase filters a big issue was the introduction of pre-echoes.
