have you ever wondered what would happen if you rounded up a bunch of obsessive
audio geeks and then locked them in a building with only the instructions to
build whatever you want and don't come out till you're done well wonder no
further because lg electronics graciously sponsored our trip all the
way to beautiful great britain to tour the r d and production facility of
world-renowned speaker manufacturer meridian
and this is going to be a good one because while
on the surface meridian's flagship 100
000 speakers here couldn't be more different from the lg xboom go bluetooth
speaker that i'm holding they have a lot more in common than meets the eye so
let's go have a look shall we oh great
this video is brought to you by lg's xboom go bluetooth speaker lineup check
out the special offer linked in the video description
so during development they worked closely with meridian and not just on
the voicing of the already finished product
like you'd see in many other co-developed audio products meridian was
involved in developing the specifications of the drivers and the
passive radiators that lg brands as dual
action base they were involved in the creation of both the vocal and bass
enhancing profiles and they even helped with the physical design of the back
cabinet to enhance sound quality one really cool sort of meridian special
sauce feature is actually on the pk3 here and what it does is it applies
image elevation to raise the perceived source of the sound slightly since it's
so common for people to plunk their bluetooth speakers on a table next to
them or by the pool side or whatever
so bottom line take away from this tour is
an xboom go gonna sound like the speakers that we auditioned when we
walked in the door no of course not
don't be stupid but the folks here at meridian are still
proud to take credit for bringing better sound quality to the rest of us as well
who can't afford six-figure speakers
except for one thing right the the RGB lighting they actually didn't want any
of the credit for that no pride uh they were very clear that's on lg but you
know what whatever i think it's cool we'll start with a
little bit of history when meridian launched their first product in 1977
powered loudspeakers so ones with the electronics built into them were only
available in the professional world but while these were expensive at around
2000 pounds their strategy of using
dedicated amplifiers for each driver unit allowed them to split the incoming
signal before amplification avoiding
some of the messiness of a crossover and actually when the folks here hooked
these puppies up to some spotify they were shocked at how well they've
stood the test of time so then you fast forward i don't know what is
this 40 some odd years and the vast majority of consumer audio devices now
are highly integrated containing not just drivers and amplifiers but even
advanced digital sound processors that can decode high bit rate streams like
bluetooth with optics hd like this guy and dramatically improve performance
where cost or physical size constraints
had previously made decent sounding audio simply impossible
but this is fun it turns out meridian knows a thing or two about that as well
have you guys ever heard of dolby true hd well long story but it's a method of
compressing high-resolution blu-ray audio losslessly that was originally
called meridian lossless packing
and it was invented right here now the vast majority of product
development is done in software these days but
when push comes to shove you do have to build one and actually listen to it
eventually so to that end they built what they call the inner sanctum
including this anechoic chamber which is used in combination with more realistic
listening scenarios to ensure that every product that they build here meets the
standards of a group of golden ears who work together to evaluate how closely
the product represents the original recording honestly speaking though for
me it wasn't the admittedly very nice good job you guys uh graphics on the
wall here that blew me away it was the production floor now i've seen a good
number of manufacturing facilities but this one
is completely unlike any that i've encountered for one thing it's
practically a ghost town in here and it's not like they cleared it out for me
or anything that's apparently just the way that they
work they've got far more build stations and testing
stations than they do people to work at them which they say is perfect for the
small batches that they produce for their worldwide dealer network
so without further ado then shall we follow
the journey of a loudspeaker all the way through
well you don't really have a choice that's what we're doing let's go
first up while they source bare pcbs
from an outside manufacturer a number of years ago meridian invested in their own
smt line which means that whether it's
for in-house prototyping for brand partnerships like the one they have with
lg or as we're about to see right now
retail product manufacturing they can build their own boards in-house
so first up then the board goes into this machine where it gets a coating of
this gray kind of oozy solder paste that actually
gets squeezed through these holes in the aluminum template so that it ends up on
all of the contact pads on our bare printed circuit board then our board
goes into a pick and place machine that automatically places the smaller board
components using computer vision to ensure that there are no obvious defects
so then from there it goes into a second pick and place machine that handles the
larger components so you can see those are on the spools
right here but we're actually going to stop for a moment here and draw your
attention to this blundell production
equipment cabinet here so this is pretty
cool some of the dsp and compute chips
actually need to be stored under specific environmental conditions or
they can absorb moisture from the surrounding air which can turn into a
steam pocket during the final stage of production and cause damage
the more you know right which i guess brings us perfectly to the
final stage the pizza oven so at this
point here everything on that board is actually
only held in place by the stickiness of
the solder paste now of course i was being a little
facetious before uh however much this does actually bear
a resemblance to a pizza oven it's of course a bit more complicated than that
and in fact this one here can handle both traditional surface mounts you know
with the little legs around the outside of the chip and bga chips which have all
the solder pads on the bottom fun fact by the way when you're
designing a double-sided board you have to account for running it through the
oven twice so you don't want to put anything too
heavy on the bottom or it's all going to fall off when the solder remelts
so here at the other end out comes our finished board it sits and cools for a
little bit then gets carried over to this station
where it's scanned by a combination of optical recognition software and
real live human intervention how about that
now you might have noticed though in that close-up before that there's still
a lot of contact pads that are empty on
our board here well believe it or not a shocking amount
of the soldering work here at meridian is still done by hand so here we are at
one of those stations um unfortunately it's not running right now i did say
it's kind of ghost town in here but you'll have to imagine it because this
is a really old machine but a cool one
nonetheless so what you do is you press this button right here and then pretty
much there's these drawers that are built into the entire table that come
out you take out the component and then there's a lens up here that focuses like
a red beam onto where you place the component then you go ahead and press
the next button you grab the next one and put that onto your board you build
the whole thing manually like that crazy right
then you take your finish board and walk over
here this little guy's lots of fun
so if you've ever seen a surface mount component here's a capacitor they've
actually got super long leads on them and this allows them to be mounted in
multiple ways like you could kind of bend them like this and then lay them
over on the side but they don't want that they want it stuck through and then
they want as little excess on the back of the board as possible so this little
guy right here kind of guillotines off the back of the leads so
that they're as flush as possible to the back of the board so they don't short
out on anything oh i think we're done
now we're ready for the solder wave it's apparently actually what they call
it so the board goes along this conveyor
where it gets blasted with flux and preheated then it pretty much passes
over this pool of molten solder that seeps up into the
joints but like gross
look at this thing it's got shmoo all over the top of the solder pool we don't
want that anywhere near our components well that is where the wave comes in so
it grabs clean solder from the bottom of the pool and then it runs the bottom of
our board over that kind of well wave as it passes by
well no not actually cool at all it's like really hot actually kind of
dangerous but but like neat
so this machine here is called the flying probe
and given britain's long and colorful
history of creative torture devices i wouldn't blame you for thinking that
that sounds a lot worse than it is but basically
it's kind of like a cnc multimeter
it's got four sharp probes that measure every single resistor and capacitor and
then that spit out an error if a measurement
doesn't match the expected value so you can actually see this readout
here where it's going around and poking and prodding at all the solder points to
make sure that everything is a-okay it actually takes up to 13 minutes for
this thing to test a single board which
i guess in very small volumes is fine
but in mass production this would be suicide that's where this
tester comes in it uses a template and
then a whole bunch of relays that are in the machine in the back here instead of
a cnc probulator to do that same job in
about 20 seconds the only drawback is
that these templates cost a lot and they
take weeks to make why does it take so long you might ask
well because aside from creating all
these little probes here in the front that just all stick into the back of the
board at the same time you've also got to oh
wire it up at the back and the worst part is that if you change
one thing about the design of the board you got to make this all over again so
you only do one of these when you are serious about doing larger runs
so then every single board that comes through here goes through one of these
machines which seems kind of inefficient doesn't it
but i guess that's that's what kind of stands out about the
culture here no one i've seen appears to be in any
sort of hurry to like meet a quota
they're just trying to build the best damn thing and
if you appreciate that and you've got deep pockets
sick good for you otherwise i don't know i guess
go buy something else by this stage our board is very unlikely to
blow up if we plug it in so it moves either as a raw board a half
built product a finished product or some combination of the three into human
testing land here that is to say the land where humans test it not the
land where humans get tested
anyway meridian uses a combination of real av products and signal generators
some of which were actually designed and built right here to ensure that every
input and output works the way that the user would expect before moving the
product to the soak area over here where it gets burned in for hours
all of that is just the electronics though now let's take a look at
the cabinets now i'm gonna put that down
meridian is known for their dsp tech but
signal processing is not magic and good
physical engineering principles matter too so
you think those speakers that we saw out there are just made of mdf or whatever
think again these high-end units are actually
constructed from three layers of plywood
with an additional layer of aluminium as well as this weird kind of glue
resin stuff along with a whack of
internal bracing actually this is cool even the outer glossy coating apparently
contributes to deadening the sound waves within the cabinet as completely as
possible so they won't color the sound
and i will say this if nothing else it makes
for a very impressive demo when they are literally shaking the ceiling tiles of
their showcase room with a 5p coin
balanced on its side sitting directly on top of the speaker finally every unit
gets bolted together and the whole thing gets tested here by an engineer to
ensure that there's no distortion no buzzes or rattles or anything like that
from the cabinet anything loose then they run a computer check that can
be overlaid with a reference frequency response curve to ensure that it matches
the golden model that they've got stored away somewhere honestly it's rare to see
anything made with this kind of enthusiast level care and attention
these days lg is running a promotion right now on all three xboom go models
their super compact pk3 with full submersion water resistance their pk5
which features both clear vocal and enhanced bass profiles and up to 18
hours of battery life and their flagship pk7 with dual tweeters and up to 22
hours of battery life go check out the link to the xboom go pk3 pk5 and pk7 in
the video description so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video well you can hit
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