App control

Meridian has its own apps — quite a flurry of them indeed, including the Meridian Control app (top right). But each 200 Series units acts as an ‘endpoint’ for Meridian’s own Sooloos music management software, or as zones for paid Roon music management software (below right: Roon was developed by people previously involved with Meridian and Sooloos). Each of those provides a rich touchscreen experience for browsing your digital music collection, while Roon extends the full experience also to desktop computer control. Both Sooloos and Roon also tightly incorporate Tidal’s music subscription service into their control screens, thereby putting pretty much all the world’s music at your fingertips. Tidal’s Hi-Fi-level service includes access to MQA-encoded high-res ‘Masters’ albums, and the 200 Series are all MQA-equipped — not a huge surprise, perhaps, since it was Meridian which originally invented the MQA process. A light illuminates to tell you if these are ‘merely’ high-res or satisy the top level of MQA: high-res files authenticated by the studio and/or copyright owner. You can’t get closer to studio quality than that.