Meridian Explorer 2 Portable Digital to Analog Converter (DAC)

This product is MQA-ready
Allowing you to experience the full, intricate detail of a live performance for the first time in the history of recorded music.

Hear More and Feel More
Meridian’s new Explorer² is the successor to the popular and widely acclaimed Explorer pocket USB DAC. Featuring a dramatically increased complement of DSP, Explorer² is able to incorporate the full suite of Meridian’s audio enhancement technologies to provide a more realistic, natural sound than ever before.

The Meridian Experience in your hand
Explorer² replaces a computer’s audio outputs with a USB-powered DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) featuring over 30 years of Meridian’s digital expertise in high-quality audio circuitry. Explorer² includes digital clocking derived from Meridian’s award-winning Reference Series components, for precise timing of digital signals.

Meridian has paid as much attention to the analogue circuitry as the digital. Explorer² features a pure analog volume control with a powerful headphone amplifier and a line output. This provides sophisticated volume control with an extended range of 100dB – ideal for sensitive headphones. Whatever you listen to, Explorer² makes it sound its best.

MASTER QUALITY AUTHENTICATED (MQA)
Sourced from the original studio master recording as approved by the creative team, MQA combines an advanced new digital sampling technology that captures extremely high frequency timing and detail in an audio signal with an equally novel system to “encapsulate” that data into a form for delivery using any lossless file format or streaming. The listener’s decoder reconstructs the entire original signal, bringing up an indicator confirming that what they are hearing is exactly the same as the original master. Without the decoder, the listener enjoys CD quality reproduction. Its most advanced form, “MQA Studio”, uses the technology in the studio to generate an even higher quality master recording as the source.

MERIDIAN APODISING FILTER
Filters are critical in digital audio. Commonly they introduce distortion and harshness because of "pre-ringing". Early digital recordings suffer from harshness too, due to primitive filters. After painstaking research, Meridian developed a special filter that avoids pre-ringing, so it can be steeper, cleaning up the effects of early filters. The result: a better, cleaner sound from recordings old and new.