The Meridian F80 is a compact all-in-one music system.
The product owes much of its style and finish to Ferrari who worked on design
in collaboration with Meridian. Meridian claim the F80 features many
technologies distilled from Meridian’s flagship products, helping it extract
detail and reveal information previously buried in the recording.
What we found with the F80 is that is gives a performance
that belies its size. Sure, many small systems can fool you into thinking that
the sound is much bigger than the box, but the F80 delivers a near magical
experience convincing you that the sound is coming from loudspeakers several more
times the size. It is not just about big sound; the F80 oozes high performance
from CD, with plenty of detail and power.
So when asked to upgrade an F80 we took a long hard look
at the design and did some lateral thinking. The solution was to leave the core
circuits unchanged and concentrate on where the sound came from and incorporate
Bybee purifiers on the loudspeaker drivers Having used the Bybee product on several
different loudspeaker types we have concluded it is possibly the best location
to use and realise the potential of the Bybee product in a system. Furthermore,
Bybee Technolgies own research led to the highly acclaimed Bybee
Super Effect Speaker Bullets, a product which scooped the ‘Stereotimes’
most wanted award.
The Slipstream purifiers are not SE Bullets, but they are
superb in their own class and allow us to bring the Bybee effect to the F80. The
F80 uses 3 drivers in total, 2 front for left and right output, and a rear
subwoofer; so a total of 6 slipstream purifiers are added directly to the
driver solder tags.
The resulting sound after the upgrade paints a much more
accurate picture of the music, the music really opens up and you can hear
deeper into recordings, bass is tighter; the overall sound is more focused,
with better clarity. At an investment of approximately a third of the cost of
the F80 (£554.50 ex VAT), the sound quality improvements this upgrade firmly places
the product at the top of the tree and is argument for the best
all-in-one-system is won!
The Meridian F80, arguably the best all-on-one system gets
much better with our upgrades providing the ultimate in sound quality on the
move.
