The group were welcomed to Meridian by John Buchanan, CEO of Meridian, Barry Sheldrick, Director of Sales at Meridian and Ryan Donaher from Meridian’s US distributor, Apex Technologies US. John provided an update on Meridian’s business position, which culminated in an unveiling of the brand-new DSP9 loudspeakers. The visitors were then separated into three groups to allow them all to experience a series of activities throughout the day.

Morning sessions:

• An engineering-focussed demonstration and explanation of the DSP9 loudspeakers in the Engineering Team’s main listening room.

• A demonstration of the Meridian “Lounge” home theatre system using various loudspeakers from Meridian’s range of installation models, combined with projection and room treatment projects from brands distributed by the DbM arm of Meridian’s UK operation.

• A tour of Meridian’s manufacturing facilities based on the flow of products through the production areas. The tour was led by John and showed the group how automated and manual processes are involved in transforming bare circuit boards into finished Meridian products.

Afternoon sessions:

• A demonstration of Meridian’s HPA (High Power Array) technology applied to Meridian’s in-wall loudspeakers. Three were combined to act as each loudspeaker channel with HPA enabling extremely high output levels to be produced while avoiding issues usually associated with multiple sound sources.

• A two-part demonstration –within Meridian’s Reference Digital Theatre room. The group were played a series of tracks through three combinations of installation loudspeakers – a pair of DSP320 loudspeakers installed in the ceiling of the room, a pair of DSP750s and the same DSP750s

augmented by two DSW600 in-wall subwoofers. There was then a demonstration of the full theatre system using including music (live and movie-sourced) and movie clips.

• A chance to listen to the flagship DSP8000 XE loudspeaker in the informal setting of the Reception area. As well as pieces of music chosen by Alex Boulton, Technical Support Consultant, the visitors were given free rein to select what they wanted to hear.

After these sessions, the whole group reassembled in reception, where Katy Bradshaw, Director of Marketing presented a summary of Meridian as a brand, emphasising the importance of Engineering as well as explaining the breadth of the company’s activities.

The final presentation of the day was on Meridian Research and Applied Technologies. Stephen Oxnard, Senior Research Team gave an overview of Meridian’s activity in these fields, and Ethan Stanhope, Research Engineer gave an explanation of how Meridian approaches a research project, using the example of the current research into haptics; including their psychoacoustic effect on our hearing and how this could be applied to audio playback.