Meridian CD Players

I have the separate 566.24 and 500 for 2 years, then I found better. I can tell you the followings cost less sound better:

Yamaha CDR-1000 (also a CDR) New price is $1200.
Proceed PDT-3 (transport)
Marantz CDR620, CDR615 (transport)
Philips SACD-1000
Marantz SA-14 (SACD)
Sony's SCD-777ES or equivalent
Revox 226 (or Studer equivalent)
DAC:
Apogee DAC's (or Cello re-brand)
Althought there are other good DACs, most are too smooth to match your Mcintosh setup.

Extreme, what have you been smoking. I had the
Revox 226 CD Player. I replaced it with the Meridian 508 20 CD Player. There is no comparison. The Meridian is light years better. Its smoother sweeter and silkier sounding. I'v also heard the Meridian 566 20 Dac, 518 Jitter reducer and the 500 transport and it sounded unbelievable.

508.24 is one of the better straight 24 bit players I have ever heard.

Has anyone compared the 506.24 to the 508.2? Please, give a real response... No... "meridian 508.2 are really neat! i have one!"

thanx for listenin!

My response may go against all of the others but I will give it a try. I have been an audio buff for the better part of 15 years now. I have auditioned much gear, and already gon through the money=better phase of audio. Now I consider products to really excel if the price/performance ratio is outstanding.

The 506.20 is a sleeper product from Meridian and is truly a classic in my opinion. At the price used it is untouchable. I have owned it for years and have yet to find a CD player even close in performance.

The 508.20 has balanced outputs and is significantly more money. The balanced outputs are "created" using op-amps and are not truly balanced. Listening to it single ended I found it to have less bloom and sound drier than the 506.20. I would have to stretch to assume in balanced it sounds better, but personally I don't care. A player anywhere near this amount of money should excel no matter which outputs are chosen.

Buy the 506.20 or 24. They are great.