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have you ever wondered what would happen if you rounded up a bunch of obsessive

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audio geeks and then locked them in a building with only the instructions to

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build whatever you want and don't come out till you're done well wonder no

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further because lg electronics graciously sponsored our trip all the

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way to beautiful great britain to tour the r d and production facility of

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world-renowned speaker manufacturer meridian

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and this is going to be a good one because while

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on the surface meridian's flagship 100

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000 speakers here couldn't be more different from the lg xboom go bluetooth

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speaker that i'm holding they have a lot more in common than meets the eye so

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let's go have a look shall we oh great

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this video is brought to you by lg's xboom go bluetooth speaker lineup check

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out the special offer linked in the video description

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so during development they worked closely with meridian and not just on

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the voicing of the already finished product

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like you'd see in many other co-developed audio products meridian was

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involved in developing the specifications of the drivers and the

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passive radiators that lg brands as dual

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action base they were involved in the creation of both the vocal and bass

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enhancing profiles and they even helped with the physical design of the back

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cabinet to enhance sound quality one really cool sort of meridian special

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sauce feature is actually on the pk3 here and what it does is it applies

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image elevation to raise the perceived source of the sound slightly since it's

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so common for people to plunk their bluetooth speakers on a table next to

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them or by the pool side or whatever

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so bottom line take away from this tour is

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an xboom go gonna sound like the speakers that we auditioned when we

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walked in the door no of course not

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don't be stupid but the folks here at meridian are still

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proud to take credit for bringing better sound quality to the rest of us as well

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who can't afford six-figure speakers

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except for one thing right the the RGB lighting they actually didn't want any

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of the credit for that no pride uh they were very clear that's on lg but you

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know what whatever i think it's cool we'll start with a

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little bit of history when meridian launched their first product in 1977

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powered loudspeakers so ones with the electronics built into them were only

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available in the professional world but while these were expensive at around

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2000 pounds their strategy of using

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dedicated amplifiers for each driver unit allowed them to split the incoming

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signal before amplification avoiding

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some of the messiness of a crossover and actually when the folks here hooked

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these puppies up to some spotify they were shocked at how well they've

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stood the test of time so then you fast forward i don't know what is

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this 40 some odd years and the vast majority of consumer audio devices now

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are highly integrated containing not just drivers and amplifiers but even

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advanced digital sound processors that can decode high bit rate streams like

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bluetooth with optics hd like this guy and dramatically improve performance

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where cost or physical size constraints

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had previously made decent sounding audio simply impossible

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but this is fun it turns out meridian knows a thing or two about that as well

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have you guys ever heard of dolby true hd well long story but it's a method of

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compressing high-resolution blu-ray audio losslessly that was originally

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called meridian lossless packing

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and it was invented right here now the vast majority of product

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development is done in software these days but

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when push comes to shove you do have to build one and actually listen to it

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eventually so to that end they built what they call the inner sanctum

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including this anechoic chamber which is used in combination with more realistic

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listening scenarios to ensure that every product that they build here meets the

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standards of a group of golden ears who work together to evaluate how closely

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the product represents the original recording honestly speaking though for

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me it wasn't the admittedly very nice good job you guys uh graphics on the

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wall here that blew me away it was the production floor now i've seen a good

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number of manufacturing facilities but this one

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is completely unlike any that i've encountered for one thing it's

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practically a ghost town in here and it's not like they cleared it out for me

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or anything that's apparently just the way that they

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work they've got far more build stations and testing

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stations than they do people to work at them which they say is perfect for the

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small batches that they produce for their worldwide dealer network

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so without further ado then shall we follow

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the journey of a loudspeaker all the way through

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well you don't really have a choice that's what we're doing let's go

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first up while they source bare pcbs

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from an outside manufacturer a number of years ago meridian invested in their own

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smt line which means that whether it's

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for in-house prototyping for brand partnerships like the one they have with

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lg or as we're about to see right now

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retail product manufacturing they can build their own boards in-house

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so first up then the board goes into this machine where it gets a coating of

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this gray kind of oozy solder paste that actually

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gets squeezed through these holes in the aluminum template so that it ends up on

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all of the contact pads on our bare printed circuit board then our board

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goes into a pick and place machine that automatically places the smaller board

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components using computer vision to ensure that there are no obvious defects

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so then from there it goes into a second pick and place machine that handles the

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larger components so you can see those are on the spools

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right here but we're actually going to stop for a moment here and draw your

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attention to this blundell production

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equipment cabinet here so this is pretty

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cool some of the dsp and compute chips

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actually need to be stored under specific environmental conditions or

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they can absorb moisture from the surrounding air which can turn into a

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steam pocket during the final stage of production and cause damage

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the more you know right which i guess brings us perfectly to the

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final stage the pizza oven so at this

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point here everything on that board is actually

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only held in place by the stickiness of

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the solder paste now of course i was being a little

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facetious before uh however much this does actually bear

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a resemblance to a pizza oven it's of course a bit more complicated than that

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and in fact this one here can handle both traditional surface mounts you know

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with the little legs around the outside of the chip and bga chips which have all

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the solder pads on the bottom fun fact by the way when you're

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designing a double-sided board you have to account for running it through the

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oven twice so you don't want to put anything too

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heavy on the bottom or it's all going to fall off when the solder remelts

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so here at the other end out comes our finished board it sits and cools for a

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little bit then gets carried over to this station

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where it's scanned by a combination of optical recognition software and

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real live human intervention how about that

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now you might have noticed though in that close-up before that there's still

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a lot of contact pads that are empty on

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our board here well believe it or not a shocking amount

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of the soldering work here at meridian is still done by hand so here we are at

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one of those stations um unfortunately it's not running right now i did say

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it's kind of ghost town in here but you'll have to imagine it because this

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is a really old machine but a cool one

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nonetheless so what you do is you press this button right here and then pretty

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much there's these drawers that are built into the entire table that come

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out you take out the component and then there's a lens up here that focuses like

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a red beam onto where you place the component then you go ahead and press

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the next button you grab the next one and put that onto your board you build

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the whole thing manually like that crazy right

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then you take your finish board and walk over

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here this little guy's lots of fun

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so if you've ever seen a surface mount component here's a capacitor they've

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actually got super long leads on them and this allows them to be mounted in

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multiple ways like you could kind of bend them like this and then lay them

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over on the side but they don't want that they want it stuck through and then

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they want as little excess on the back of the board as possible so this little

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guy right here kind of guillotines off the back of the leads so

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that they're as flush as possible to the back of the board so they don't short

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out on anything oh i think we're done

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now we're ready for the solder wave it's apparently actually what they call

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it so the board goes along this conveyor

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where it gets blasted with flux and preheated then it pretty much passes

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over this pool of molten solder that seeps up into the

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joints but like gross

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look at this thing it's got shmoo all over the top of the solder pool we don't

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want that anywhere near our components well that is where the wave comes in so

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it grabs clean solder from the bottom of the pool and then it runs the bottom of

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our board over that kind of well wave as it passes by

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well no not actually cool at all it's like really hot actually kind of

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dangerous but but like neat

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so this machine here is called the flying probe

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and given britain's long and colorful

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history of creative torture devices i wouldn't blame you for thinking that

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that sounds a lot worse than it is but basically

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it's kind of like a cnc multimeter

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it's got four sharp probes that measure every single resistor and capacitor and

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then that spit out an error if a measurement

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doesn't match the expected value so you can actually see this readout

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here where it's going around and poking and prodding at all the solder points to

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make sure that everything is a-okay it actually takes up to 13 minutes for

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this thing to test a single board which

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i guess in very small volumes is fine

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but in mass production this would be suicide that's where this

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tester comes in it uses a template and

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then a whole bunch of relays that are in the machine in the back here instead of

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a cnc probulator to do that same job in

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about 20 seconds the only drawback is

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that these templates cost a lot and they

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take weeks to make why does it take so long you might ask

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well because aside from creating all

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these little probes here in the front that just all stick into the back of the

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board at the same time you've also got to oh

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wire it up at the back and the worst part is that if you change

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one thing about the design of the board you got to make this all over again so

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you only do one of these when you are serious about doing larger runs

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so then every single board that comes through here goes through one of these

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machines which seems kind of inefficient doesn't it

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but i guess that's that's what kind of stands out about the

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culture here no one i've seen appears to be in any

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sort of hurry to like meet a quota

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they're just trying to build the best damn thing and

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if you appreciate that and you've got deep pockets

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sick good for you otherwise i don't know i guess

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go buy something else by this stage our board is very unlikely to

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blow up if we plug it in so it moves either as a raw board a half

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built product a finished product or some combination of the three into human

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testing land here that is to say the land where humans test it not the

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land where humans get tested

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anyway meridian uses a combination of real av products and signal generators

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some of which were actually designed and built right here to ensure that every

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input and output works the way that the user would expect before moving the

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product to the soak area over here where it gets burned in for hours

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all of that is just the electronics though now let's take a look at

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the cabinets now i'm gonna put that down

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meridian is known for their dsp tech but

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signal processing is not magic and good

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physical engineering principles matter too so

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you think those speakers that we saw out there are just made of mdf or whatever

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think again these high-end units are actually

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constructed from three layers of plywood

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with an additional layer of aluminium as well as this weird kind of glue

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resin stuff along with a whack of

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internal bracing actually this is cool even the outer glossy coating apparently

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contributes to deadening the sound waves within the cabinet as completely as

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possible so they won't color the sound

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and i will say this if nothing else it makes

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for a very impressive demo when they are literally shaking the ceiling tiles of

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their showcase room with a 5p coin

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balanced on its side sitting directly on top of the speaker finally every unit

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gets bolted together and the whole thing gets tested here by an engineer to

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ensure that there's no distortion no buzzes or rattles or anything like that

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from the cabinet anything loose then they run a computer check that can

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be overlaid with a reference frequency response curve to ensure that it matches

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the golden model that they've got stored away somewhere honestly it's rare to see

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anything made with this kind of enthusiast level care and attention

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these days lg is running a promotion right now on all three xboom go models

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their super compact pk3 with full submersion water resistance their pk5

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which features both clear vocal and enhanced bass profiles and up to 18

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hours of battery life and their flagship pk7 with dual tweeters and up to 22

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hours of battery life go check out the link to the xboom go pk3 pk5 and pk7 in

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the video description so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video well you can hit

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that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider

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checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also down

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there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community

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forum which you should totally join