Meridian will soon ship its newborn G61 Surround Processor. A member of the “G” family that comprises processors, amplifiers, and players, it capitalizes on the highly reputed 861 and G68 technologies.
The G61, however, targets a broader customer base at the price of £2995. For this “diminutive” price tag (in the Meridian world) however, the G61 is not equipped with multi-room, room correction and extensive Video like his big brother G68.
Yet, the G61 comes with a 500MIPS (millions of instructions per second) DSP engine, in addition to what, as soon as they enter the processor, incoming analogue signals are converted to 24-bit, high sample rate digital data via Delta-Sigma converters. The G61 is quite at ease with DVD-Audio and SACD formats.
It is THX Ultra 2 certified and decodes MPEG, DTS, Dolby, AAC, Trifield, and Ambisonic.
Two 6-channel S/PDIF digital inputs (coax), six stereo coax digital inputs and five stereo Toslink optical inputs are aboard, as well as a 6-channel analogue input, and five stereo analogue inputs. Everything is reconfigurable by the user who, in addition, can fine tune parameters for each source (CD, DVD…) allowing to choose the DSP mode.
You can also configure user parameters separately for each source (such as DVD) depending on whether the incoming signal is stereo or surround, so that any source material is played with the DSP mode of your choice.
Ten digital surround outputs for front, rear, side, centre/sub, plus an “additional configurable output pair”. Also, eight analogue outputs for front, rear, centre sub connections, plus two additional outputs for other applications.
Lovely…
Visit the Meridian Audio website here