Versatile Meridian - Dsp8000.2 Speaker Gadget [l7ItuMR8]

Overview

Grace under pressure. Designed without compromise, the DSP8000.2 cabinet features a unique construction with a dedicated bass enclosure and a separate head-assembly for the midrange and high-frequency drive units.

Utilising a multi-layer, multi-material construction technique, the DSP8000.2 pushes boundaries with the most inert cabinet Meridian has ever made. The narrow, tapered shape of the head-unit offers optimum dispersion across a wide listening area. In addition, its design emulates aspects of the human form, which psychoacoustics suggests provides a more realistic performance.

Psychoacoustics, the psychology behind how humans perceive sound, is applied throughout the design of the DSP8000.2, delivering authentically natural vocal reproduction and lifelike imaging. Deep, effortless and room-filling bass is produced without a hint of distortion by three pairs of horizontally opposed, eight-inch drivers within the bass enclosure.

Meridian’s latest DSP code ensures all audio signals, including MQA Core streams, are rendered at 88.2/96kHz regardless of the incoming sampling rate, maximising the potential of the loudspeaker’s DSP engine.

Key Features

With its extensive Research and Development programme Meridian has pioneered the development of a host of innovative audio technologies many of which feature in today’s Meridian products.

DSP Loudspeaker - 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.

Meridium - Loudspeaker enclosures often vibrate, colouring the sound, making it less lifelike. Our most advanced loudspeakers use a cabinet construction material unique to Meridian: Meridium features highest-grade laminated plywood layers bonded to an aluminium core, allowing the loudspeaker to reproduce music accurately without adding its own sound.

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.

Meridian 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.

Meridian High Resolution - 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.

Enhanced Bass Alignment (EBA) - High or low, all sounds travel at the same speed, so all the sounds from a live musical event arrive at your ear at the same time, whatever frequencies they contain. Loudspeakers, however, have a problem when playing low frequency sounds at the same time as mid and high frequencies – the bass arrives late, and the deeper the sound, the later it arrives. This delayed bass causes music to lose its impact and reduces the sense of the recorded space – it is often described as “boomy”.

The goal is to have time-accurate loudspeakers, where all reproduced frequencies start and end at the same time. In a loudspeaker, this timing is affected by the crossover, driver, and enclosure 
type. To eliminate the delay between low, and mid and high frequencies, Meridian has designed a combination of digital filters and time delays for the mid and high frequencies. This solution enables the mid and high frequencies to “wait” for the low frequencies, delivering perfectly-timed music playback.

Mid and high frequencies are delayed to time-align them, while upper bass is delayed with a special type of patented filter. These features must 
be implemented entirely in the digital domain, making them impossible to achieve in any passive or analogue-active loudspeaker design.

Enhanced Bass Alignment provides accurate time-alignment of the drivers in the system, delivering exceptional imaging and a clear, transparent, more life like sound.

Technical Specifications

View this product's PDF Data Sheet here.

View this product's PDF User Guide here.

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