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New Price, Design For Meridian Speakers

LAS VEGAS —

Meridian comes to International
CES with an active floorstanding DSP
speaker that departs from the company’s
usual industrial design and reduces the company’s
opening price point on a floorstanding
speaker to $8,000/pair from $15,000/pair.

The company is also launching an upgraded
Sooloos-controlling iPad app, which now
performs all of the functions of the touchscreen
that comes
with the $7,500
Sooloos Control
15 music server
but can be paired
with Sooloos music
servers priced
down to $4,000.

In speakers, the
company’s new
M6 two-way tower
speaker is shaped
like a cylinder that
narrows at the top.
Its dense, braced
molded cabinet is
covered in cloth in
sharp contrast with
more traditional
Meridian cabinet
designs, which feature
flat surfaces,
MDF cabinets and laquered finishes.

The new design also sports a smaller footprint
than the company’s other towers, coming
in at about 1 meter high and 10 inches
in diameter.

The two-way speaker, shipping in February,
was developed to meet dealer demand
for a lower priced tower, said CEO Peter
Wellikoff. The company’s other active DSP
speakers range in price from a $6,000 bookshelf
pair to a $65,000/pair tower.

The M6 is covered in cloth except for the
bottom portion, which consists of a black
metal-cast housing. The speaker combines
a combination tweeter-midrange driver with
a 6-inch downfiring ported woofer that delivers
high power handling with deep bass
extension, Wellikoff said.

With its lack of edges that would create
diffraction distortion, the speaker delivers
“spectacular” imaging, Wellikoff said.

The speaker incorporates all of Meridian’s
core DSP technologies as well as SpeakerLink
connection technology. SpeakerLink
delivers balanced 96kHz/24-bit digital audio
and control signals over up to 300 feet over
CAT-5e RJ-45-terminated cable from Meridian
components to DSP speakers.

For its new Sooloos app for iPads, Meridian
is going beyond the limited control and
information display of its first app to “emulate
everything a Control 15 [touchscreen] can do,” including display of high-resolution
graphics as well as fast metadata display,
Wellikoff said. The free app is due in January,

A third new product is the $15,000 Reference
preamp 818, shipping in February. It controls
the company’s Sooloos music servers.

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