Recently we wrote on these pages about Meridian Audio and the unique digital processing technology they apply to their electronics and speakers. The company's long history in digital has contributed to standards such as the DVD-Audio disc and Dolby TrueHD, and more recently they were the driving force behind MQA, the emerging standard for distributing lossless, high-resolution audio over the internet.

While their unparalleled digital audio chops are well known in hi-fi audio circles, you might not think of Meridian when it comes to home theater audio. However, they bring their digital audio processing magic to home theaters as well. In an all-Meridian system, the speakers are self-powered and the audio travels to them in digital form, keeping the signal pure until it gets converted to analog sound at the speaker.

In whole home and many home theater installations, clients want in-wall speakers for an integrated look that doesn’t upset the décor. You might be wondering if something like a powered, digital in-wall speaker is possible – it is. Meridian has developed two new in-wall digital speakers, the DSP520 and the DSP640, to make sleek hi-fi and home theater applications a reality with their unique high-resolution audio processing.

As powered in-wall speakers clearly have some differences from conventional powered speakers, Meridian has taken an extra step to ensure that their products deliver the ultimate in audio performance. They have a free design service for custom integrators like Lelch Audio-Video to make it easy to incorporate Meridian technology for home theaters and whole home installations. So if you want the powerful, detailed high-resolution audio quality of Meridian in your Woodbury home, now you can have it in your home cinema and throughout the house.

To learn more about a Meridian system for home theaters and whole home audio, just keep reading.

Meridian is a name that is well-known in high-end audio. They’re also known for marching to the beat of their own drum. Founded in 1977 – before the dawn of the CD and the digital music era – they are an early pioneer in digital audio. While powered speaker designs are quite popular today, especially in whole home audio wireless installations, Meridian introduced active (powered) high-end speakers way back in the 1980s.

The company is also a pioneer in high-resolution music formats. While high resolution (let's call it hi-res) music is a popular current term, hi-res came to music and movies quite a few years ago. Some of you audio enthusiasts that are fans of SACD and DVD-Audio, two hi-res formats that never attained mainstream status, already know that. For movie soundtracks, today’s hi-res formats like Dolby TrueHD serve up lossless audio quality and are now mainstream. Meridian had a hand in that, too, as the digital encoding called Meridian Lossless Packing is part of the standard for DVD-Audio and Dolby TrueHD.

More recently, Meridian, along with the rest of the audio industry, has embarked on a quest to take hi-res music mainstream. In today’s streaming dominated music environment, lossy formats like MP3 and AAC are used for streaming for bandwidth efficiency. Meridian has developed MQA (Master Quality Authentication) as an efficient packaging mechanism to stream both lossless CD quality and hi-res music and audio on the internet. MQA is making its way into a wide range of high-end audio gear and is used by the Tidal music service for high-quality streaming. MQA has been spun out from Meridian to facilitate the technology’s adoption in the industry.

Clearly Meridian knows as much about digital audio as just about any firm in the business. Their whole product line is built around digital technology. In this blog, we will cover Meridian Audio’s unique approach to components that deliver unsurpassed quality in digital music for your Eden Prairie listening system.