The city of Huntingdon, home of high-end audio company Meridian, is about a quintessential British town as you could picture.  It looks like a movie set.  Meridian is perhaps best known for its trapezoidal digital speakers and associated preamps.  The company has more recently gotten into portable DACs, music servers, car audio, and more. 

On a recent trip to England, I got a chance to tour the facility.  I took lots of pictures for you. 

Using feeder rolls of what look like candy buttons, robot arms rapidly jab capacitors, resistors, integrated circuits, and other components onto a circuit board.  Depending on what Meridian is making that day/week, different-size boards and different components are fed into the machine. 

To be honest, the first impression seeing these SMT machines is not one that screams high-end audio.  I've toured many manufacturing facilities, making all sorts of electronics (low and high end), and they all use pretty much the same machines. 

What surprised and impressed me was what happens after the initial production.  Every board goes through a multistage quality control check.  That in itself is impressive.  Most companies would just spot check a few boards out of a hundred (or thousand, or tens of thousands), not every board. 

This QC is extensive as well.  As you'll see in the images, there's an optical check (to make sure the right parts were used, that they're orientated correctly, etc.),  then there's a continuity check (to make sure they're seated correctly), then, after a 24- to 72-hour soak (as in, the boards are run like they would in a product), they're performance tested as well.  This is really extensive, and therefore expensive, but potentially does wonders for initial and long term reliability.  With products as expensive as most Meridian gear is, you'd certainly hope/expect it will last a long time. 

Some of the boards still require placement of components by hand.  Even today, there are some things that trained workers can do better than machines. 

Meridian

After a few hours we ended up in Meridian's beautiful and acoustically excellent listening room.  Meridian's speakers are a little different than most speakers you're probably used to reading about and/or hearing.  Instead of an external amp (or receiver), Meridian speakers are internally amplified.  This allows for lower-powered amplifiers (as they power the divers directly), but also significant possibilities in terms of digital processing.  Meridian can tweak the sound almost any way it wants, since the amps and processing are internal to the speakers. 

They demoed for me one of the latest processing advancements, called EBA, which stands for Enhanced Bass Alignment.  The idea is one that many speaker designers struggle with: the bass sounds produced by a woofer arrive slightly delayed to your ears compared to the sounds created by the midrange and tweeter.  This is different compared with what happens in real life, where all the frequencies created by a musical instrument (OK, most musical instruments), leave the instrument at the same time and arrive at your ear at roughly the same time. 

When you separate out the high and low frequencies into multiple drivers, these sounds can have a slight time difference.  Other speaker companies attempt to deal with this in different ways.  KEF, for example, buries the tweeter in the deep center of the woofer to help compensate for this.  B&W separate and set the tweeter slightly back compared with the midrange and woofer. 

With EBA, Meridian can set up a delay in the tweeter and midrange to line up the sound with the woofer's so it all arrives at your ear at the same time.  I got a chance to list to this with a few tracks, and it is pretty cool.  There's a slight tightening of the sound, a little more precision.  Instruments sound a little more realistic, and have a little more defined location in the sound stage.  Is it a huge difference?  No, but it's definitely noticeable and easily identifiable as better. 

About the author

Geoffrey Morrison is a freelance writer/photographer for CNET, Forbes, and TheWirecutter.  He also writes for Sound&Vision magazine, HDGuru.com, and several others.  He was Editor in Chief of Home Entertainment magazine and before that, Technical Editor of Home Theater magazine.  He is NIST and ISF trained, and has a degree in Television/Radio from Ithaca College.  His bestselling first novel, Undersea, is available in paperback and as an ebook on Amazon, B&N, and elsewhere. 
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