Multiroom Amplifier of the Year
Multiroom Amplifier of the Year
It might be considered brave to come to market with a new multiroom platform when so many rivals are now in the market. But then Meridian is no newcomer. It had Sooloos as an app-like control system before there were really such things as apps. The wonderful Roon software platform (see p86) began as a development right out of Sooloos. So the company’s new 200 Series is more a case of delivering smaller and installation-friendly ‘zone’-based devices which can easily spread Meridian’s existing expertise into multiroom zone-based audio. And it has the significant advantage of having high-quality and high-resolution embedded into its DNA, as it were.
The $2679 ‘251’ is a zone controller with amplifiers; also available is the 218, essentially the same but without amplifiers, so you can plug it into an existing system or a pair of active speakers. They’re both small, half rack-width, so that two can be mounted as shown below. From one point of view the 251 is a stereo amplifier with some conventional inputs, both analogue and digital, with a high-quality switching preamplifier, DAC, and two channels of Class-D amplification. But from the point of view of a Meridian system, it’s also an endpoint for the company’s Sooloos music management platform. Sooloos, which can run on an iPhone or iPad, PC or Mac, provides a beautiful and clever interface with which to control playback of a file-based music collection, and of Tidal, which integrates seamlessly into the Sooloos interface. So control is entirely virtual — there’s no physical remote provided, though you could choose to add Meridian’s new MSR2 handheld system control for $499. The units themelves can be hidden away.
The 251 proves itself a pint-sized power pack loaded with streaming goodness, and in many ways is quite brilliant, a dream to use both in terms of reliability of operation and discovery of music online or in your own collection. Tidal and MQA files are its bread and butter. As a traditional amplifier its inputs are somewhat limited, and we’re not fans of the bare-wire Phoenix screwclamp connector blocks in a hi-fi context. But the 251 proves its point many times over. More info: www.cogworks.io
JUDGES’ COMMENT “This is multiroom done smaller, neater, and in several significant ways, better.”