MERIDIAN EXPLORER 2

British high-fidelity brand Meridian has long forged its own path to hi-fi. When much of the UK industry was grimly adhering to analogue as the only true path to high fidelity, Meridian embraced digital, improving it as well as using it. The company developed systems with digital signal paths all the way to active loudspeakers, and created such things as Meridian Lossless Packing, a compression system for digital audio that not only preserved the entire signal but included integrity measures to ensure that each byte matched that of the originally encoded signal.

So good things might be anticipated from Meridian’s new portable Explorer2 DAC (digitalto-analogue converter), which is designed to take the USB output from your computer and deliver from it far better sound than any built-in DAC would offer. And thanks to a bonus bit of socketry, it can undertake such duties at home as well.