MERIDIAN AUDIO

ENGINEERED PERFORMANCE, AESTHETICS AND RESOLUTION ENHANCEMENT

Barry Sheldrick, Director of Sales at Meridian examines the demands on the modern loudspeaker.

Our ambition is to enable people to fall in love with their music and movies, wherever they are. We want to create an authentic, lifelike and natural experience as possible. To do that, we always place the listener at the heart of every performance, using our engineering and psychoacoustics expertise to deliver unrivalled sound experiences. That’s what Meridian is all about. We also see other factors at work that impact upon speaker design and challenge us to take the engineering behind loudspeaker performance to new heights.

AESTHETICS

Aesthetics is one key trend in custom installation. Being able to bring the level of extreme audio engineering that’s needed whilst at the same time meeting the client’s demand on loudspeaker looks is hugely important.

Take our DSP750 in-wall loudspeaker as an example. Specifically designed and engineered for the most demanding architectural installations as well as dedicated home cinema installations, this loudspeaker combines power and fidelity to give our dealers a discrete, outstanding solution that packs one heck of a punch.

But aesthetics are not concerned with simply hearing and not seeing the loudspeaker. Great cabinet design and customisation allow dealers to make a statement for their client as well as delivering fantastic audio performance. In many cases, clients want to make a standout feature of their beautiful loudspeaker, not hide it away.

Dealers can also choose bespoke colour services from the RAL colour system to create an ideal paint colour match for the loudspeaker cabinet with the interior.

The Farrow & Ball Elephant’s Breath shade of grey is proving an especially popular choice for Meridian floor-standing loudspeakers at present. We’ve also colour matched cabinets to Porsche and Lamborghini colours as well as to particular interior finishes in the home or in the client’s car.

Through our DbM (Distributed by Meridian) business, we’re also noticing an uptick in

interest for the incredible glass cabinet speakers available from Waterfall. These glass speakers bring a distinctive, classic elegance to any interior, and fit with any style of contemporary décor. Obviously, they sound great too!

RESOLUTION ENHANCEMENT

Resolution enhancement is another significant trend. There are more audio streaming platforms available than video streaming services and clients typically have their own preferences that we, as an industry, are unlikely to be able to influence.

We embrace this range of choice and flexibility that clients have. It’s our job as the manufacturer to ensure that our products can make the content sound as great as it possibly can, irrespective of the source.

This takes us back to the extreme engineering principles that underscore everything we do at Meridian.

The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) architecture within our loudspeakers includes our proprietary enhancement technologies, such as, FIFO buffering, upsampling, apodising filters and MHR (Meridian High Resolution). These technologies remove variable timing errors (jitter) typically with content delivered from streaming sources. Jitter degrades the music’s sense of space and diminishes realism. The result is the best possible audio outcome from all digital sources. Thanks to Meridian’s technology, clients can enjoy improved clarity and a much more natural feeling of the instruments, vocals and their interrelationship.

Loudspeakers these days have to perform aesthetically as well as sonically