SUPERBLY NATURAL SOUND

The new M6 digital active loudspeaker is a real visual departure from Meridian’s existing loudspeaker styling, but it is a genuinely high-performance Digital Signal Processing loudspeaker.

As initially impressed as we were with the appearance, the sound was almost as good as their far larger floor-standing loudspeakers: they sounded open and natural, with clean deep bass and no harshness to speak of – even when we turned them up loud! With the M6, Meridian set out to design a loudspeaker that would sound good whilst blending seamlessly into your living room. The body of the loudspeaker is acoustically inert and is formed from a specially developed barium-doped resin which is uniquely heavy and rigid.

Although the M6 is a cylindrical loudspeaker, it is directional and gives a wide and precise three-dimensional soundstage; the bass driver is mounted so that it plays downwards and the tuned porting system further extends its performance so that the M6 speakers sound far larger than their compact size. Meridian’s M6 amplifiers are housed in the base of the speakers themselves, so each speaker needs to be plugged into the mains supply.

The M6 speakers are fitted with Meridian’s unique, proprietary, digital SpeakerLink connections for perfect integration with Sooloos, AC200 and other Meridian components. A great partner for the M6’s, as we mentioned above is the Meridian AC200 audio core which provides the correct outputs to the M6 loudspeakers and nine inputs to connect a wide range of sources.

KEY TECHNOLOGY

DSP Loudspeakers – The traditional setup – amplifiers driving passive loudspeakers – is inefficient, limiting sound quality. Meridian loudspeakers contain a complete, matched audio system with efficient DSP crossovers, multiple DACs and driver-specific amplifiers, giving higher overall quality, less power use, and the performance of a traditional loudspeaker eight times the physical volume.

SpeakerLink – Traditional audio systems often require large, expensive cables to maintain their performance. Meridian’s SpeakerLink uses an “Ethernet style” cable that delivers pristine digital sound and control down a single cable between Meridian components. The result is simple, unobtrusive, and cost-effective cables that are easy to install.

Fifo Buffering – Each sample of a digital recording must remain evenly spaced in time. Unfortunately, timing can vary, especially when reading discs. This is “jitter”, degrading music’s sense of space and diminishing realism. Meridian’s multiple “First In, First Out” buffering system minimises jitter, ensuring perfect timing and improved clarity. You enjoy a clearer feeling of the instruments and their interrelationship.

Apodising Filter – Filters are critical in digital audio. Commonly they introduce distortion and harshness because of “pre-ringing”. Early digital recordings suffer from harshness too, due to primitive filters. After painstaking research, Meridian developed a special filter that avoids pre-ringing, so it can be steeper, cleaning up the effects of early filters. The result: a better, cleaner sound from recordings old and new.

Wide range driver – Loudspeakers use crossovers to “divide” music into bands their drivers can reproduce. This introduces distortion, reducing sound quality – particularly on human voice recordings. Designing a single driver for both mid and high frequencies made a crossover within the vocal range unnecessary, avoiding distortion and reproducing more lifelike vocals at all volume levels.

Meridian High Resolution (MHR) – MHR was the first approved encryption method for transferring high definition digital audio between components. Previously, it had to be in the analogue domain, reducing quality. MHR allows secure movement of high resolution digital audio within a Meridian system, without compromise, improving quality by reducing cyclic repetition.