When the Meridian G-series was originally launched some five years ago, the components tended to reflect the company's preoccupation with multichannel surround sound.

The fact that it included two standalone CD players (G06, G08) seemed almost like an afterthought, though both models proved rather more commercially successful than Meridian had anticipated.

Design similarities

Given the rate of change that goes on amongst electronic components and mechanical devices like disc drives, five years is quite a long time to keep a particular CD player design in production.

Although this new G08.2 looks just like its predecessor, and carries exactly the same £2,250 pricetag, introducing it provides Meridian with the opportunity to incorporate the latest thinking and componentry and do so at the same time as its 'flagship' 808 model also graduates to Mk2 status.

It's fair to assume that these two models will share a number of techniques and components, even though they are very different in terms of price, casework and internal architecture.

The smaller, neater G08.2 features a slot-loading system for discs, rather than the 808.2's sliding drawer, fits most of its electronics on a single horizonal board and naturally involves some economies in components and power supplies.

Hey there, good looking

It's a very attractive player. Finished in a mixture of silver anodised metal and black glass, it has just enough styling to make it look interesting and avoids over-egging the pudding and becoming fussy, though the fastidious might find the mix of fascia typefaces rather unnecessary. The player is fairly slim, but quite deep, the regulation 'full width' fascia mollified by nicely rounded vertical edges.

Most major functions are available from a row of five back-lit piano key buttons, assisted by a 'shift' or 'soft' key labelled 'more' which adds extra functions like scan, repeat, display brightness and track programming, identified on the clearly legible vacuum fluorescent display.

The Atapi ROM disc drive has a slot-loading mechanism, like those used for laptop computers and dashboard in-car players, so all that's needed is an 'eject' button.

However, these controls are really just a back-up, as most operations will be carried out using the remote control unit – the term 'handset' is hardly appropriate for the quite bulky table-top device supplied here.

Codenamed MSR+ and about the same size as a paperback book, this unit is willing and able to operate a complete Meridian system, may be programmed to control source components from other brands and even comes with its own instruction booklet.

Generously connected

The rear panel is well-stuffed with socketry, ensuring fine connection flexibility. Both balanced (XLR) and single-ended (phono) stereo outputs are available, as are S/PDIF digital outputs in both optical (TOSlink)
and electrical (phono) form. Extras include an RS232 plus infra-red sensor reception and comms sockets for integration in Meridian systems.

The G08.2 uses a computer-style ROM drive to read the CDs and this allows high scanning speeds so that data can be re-read if necessary to ensure accurate recovery and error avoidance. The associated buffering system uses re-clocking to minimise jitter.

The player handles regular CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs and the majority of 'hybrid' discs and will deliver the data from DTS CDs via the digital output for external decoding.

Upsampling issues

High bandwidth/bit-rate (176.4kHz/24-bit) Delta Sigma DACs are used and a powerful 150MIPS (million bits per second) digital processor upsamples the regulation 44.1kHz/16-bit CD data to 176.4kHz/24-bit for feeding to the internal DACs, or to 88.2kHz at the digital output.

Much of what we don't like about the CD medium is to do with the players' anti-aliasing filters and the steeper linear-phase digital filters that replaced analogue minimum-phase filters also generated pre-echo.