Any avid reader of Audio Science Review knows that we are disappointed with the objective measurements of today's home theater receivers and surround processors. They generally rank in the third performance tier and often below a $9 phone dongle in distortion and noise. Today's players are almost all mass market companies as the advent of HDMI AV standard killed all the high-end audio companies that were producing AV processors. Reason is that their volume was too small for the HDMI transceiver IC companies to support them so they had no choice but to exist the market. But did they ever produce good products? A member loaned me the Meridian G68 processor to answer that question.
The G68ADV feels quite elegant compared to the generic look we have in AV products:
The interface is very easy to navigate with a number of hard buttons to select input (and "more" button which shows another row).
I see the G68ADV costing about $1000 in the used market. When announced back in 2005, it had a retail price of US $8,999 so definitely "high-end."
Processor DAC Audio Measurements
Let's get right into it and see how its DAC performs using S/PDIF input and main left and right analog outputs:
SINAD is dominated by the second harmonic at 93 dB (dashboard FFT is NOT at 0 dB). This is "bad" as many home theater products today:
Signal to noise ratio beats the CD format but is generally inline with what we see today:
Jitter performance is very good although noise level is higher than I like to see:
Intermodulation distortion matches expectations set so far:
Linearity was rather disappointing:
Conclusions
By today's standard of what we can achieve in DACs, the Meridian G68ADV would get a failing grade. Considering the product is more than 15 years old, I guess we can cut some slack for it. Surely Meridian today would be able to do better than it did then with advent of much better DAC ICs. How much better, we will never know.
For now, I don't find anything strange or broken in the implementation. Just not performant enough to be competitive today.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
I have some good and bad news for you all:
Good news: gardening has made me more active which will likely mean I will live longer and can do more reviews for you all.
Bad news: that means any money I get from you has to last a lot more years before I expire.
Conclusion: I need more money so please donate some using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The G68ADV feels quite elegant compared to the generic look we have in AV products:
The interface is very easy to navigate with a number of hard buttons to select input (and "more" button which shows another row).
I see the G68ADV costing about $1000 in the used market. When announced back in 2005, it had a retail price of US $8,999 so definitely "high-end."
Processor DAC Audio Measurements
Let's get right into it and see how its DAC performs using S/PDIF input and main left and right analog outputs:
SINAD is dominated by the second harmonic at 93 dB (dashboard FFT is NOT at 0 dB). This is "bad" as many home theater products today:
Signal to noise ratio beats the CD format but is generally inline with what we see today:
Jitter performance is very good although noise level is higher than I like to see:
Intermodulation distortion matches expectations set so far:
Linearity was rather disappointing:
Conclusions
By today's standard of what we can achieve in DACs, the Meridian G68ADV would get a failing grade. Considering the product is more than 15 years old, I guess we can cut some slack for it. Surely Meridian today would be able to do better than it did then with advent of much better DAC ICs. How much better, we will never know.
For now, I don't find anything strange or broken in the implementation. Just not performant enough to be competitive today.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
I have some good and bad news for you all:
Good news: gardening has made me more active which will likely mean I will live longer and can do more reviews for you all.
Bad news: that means any money I get from you has to last a lot more years before I expire.
Conclusion: I need more money so please donate some using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/