Premiere Design

Video demos were mighty scarce at T.H.E. Show last week. One notable exception was located in a ballroom hosted by Digital Ear, a high-end dealer in Tustin, CA. The centerpiece of the demo system was the 810 4K D-ILA projector from Meridian (profiled here) in its first public showing.

The demo material included no 4K-native content, "only" Blu-rays played on a Sony PS3 and upscaled by the Meridian processor based on the Marvell Qdeo engine. Also, the projector had been damaged during shipment, so it was limited to 2.35:1 with the anamorphic lens in place and a display rate of 60Hz. Even so, the image looked superb on a 16-foot-wide Stewart StudioTek 130 screen, which was perforated to allow a Meridian DSP7200 to serve as the center-channel speaker behind the screen.

The rest of the 7.0 audio system included two DSP8000s for the front left and right, two DSP5200s for the side surrounds, and two more DSP7200s for the rear surrounds. All the speakers are self-powered and accept a digital signal from the 861 v6 pre/pro, and the entire system sounded wonderful. I sat for quite a while watching and listening to The Police's Certifiable and Sting: Live in Berlin as well as clips from How to Train Your Dragon, Tears of the Sun, and the Dark Knight.