My 2019 Update Thread - My final system I think.

[Gazjam]

And to round off the weekend of fun.

Some time on the new speakers now, have a feel now for their sound signature, so time to start messin' around.
From the factory they come fitted with the usual link bars hooking up the biwire terminals, though these ones look kinda cool.



First step was to remove these and fit better speaker cable jumpers and see what the effect of that was.

Have some unused Duelund DCA16GA tin plated copper in cotton and oil I bought for my Impulse H2 refurb (one day!) so cut of 4 small lengths of that, just to hear the effects of removing the link bars.
Speakers were already great, so this was going to be interesting.



... and
its true what you read.

Get rid of the supplied bars with any speaker that comes with them, the sound just opened up, no more slightly muddled top end, details were coming through a lot better.
Ran with those for a couple of days to get used to the sound of those.
Very good, nice improvement over before, soundstage had opened up a fair bit too.

So far so what, but this is where it gets a bit more interesting.

Remembering I had 2 lengths of the Duelund 16GA sitting in a drawer and being really impressed with the sound of just using short lengths for jumper cables, I thought about how I could better make use of the new cable hookup options I had between the new speakers and the big Meridian power amp.

Well:
Biwire terminals on the speakers, so why not hook up the Duelund as a 2nd run of cable to the amp, see how that affects things?
Use my current Morrow SP7 MkII with Eichmann KLEI connectors for the bass, and the Duelund for the Treble?

At this point I was just experimenting, still feel the speakers need some time on them to fully open up, but just enjoying the music meantime and not over thinking it.
So stripped the Duelund back to fresh wire and connected it to the Treble terminals of the speakers.

My original plan was to make up jumpers made from the Morrow cable terminated with the same KLEI silver banana plugs, (Go on any forum and Biwiring benefits are moot...), so original plan was to run jumpers of the same cable and call it done.
I was just playing around with options, so why not?

Speaker connections done, now to the amp.



Oh...
I'd forgotten about that...

Last speakers I used only had 1 set of binding posts , so I'd hooked them up to the meridian using 1 set of terminals.

The 557 power amp has a trick up its sleeve, its a dual mono amp.
Two separate amplifiers in one chassis.
Share the same Toroidal transformer, sure, at least the primary winding, but was only thinking about testing biwiring never mind...possibly getting benefits of biamping, or even monoblocks?

With my previous Dali Zensor 5's (from the Meridian's point of view) I was using half of one amp for the bass, and half of the other for the treble.
If I ran two runs of cable, and hooked it up Monoblock style: (One internal amp for one speaker the other for the other) the speakers would be much better served from the power amp.
Cool, hadn't thought of that, wonder how it sounds in comparison?

Speaking of that transformer, its a 1.6KVA and can deliver clean 30A down to 2 Ohms.
So a bit of a beast.
The Meridian pretty much doubles up watts at half impedance and at 200 watts @ 8ohm I wasn't worrying too much about measurements...I knew power delivery wasn't going to be an issue.
The Wharfedale speakers' impedance curve generally dips down close to 4 Ohm, and according to the Meridian 557 manual utilising both sets of terminals would result in best sound quality if you have speakers with biamp terminals.

Effectively running the amp as Monoblocks: One amp for one speaker the other for the other.



And did it give the best sound?

Short answer:
YES.
Step change better.

"No substitute for cubic inches" as they say, feel the speakers are being driven an awful lot better than before.
Low end grip, rock solid soundstage...all the hifi buzzwords.

The Meridian is a beast.
Probably hearing more of what its capable of now.

Standout moment I think is listening to Agnes Obel live?
Rock solid piano notes, appearing in space and having the "thwack" of a drum hit, and the reverb of that taking over 10 seconds to fade away from its space in the soundstage, whilst other stuff was going on at the same time.

Never heard this before, never heard my system sound so "live music" and in the room.