Meridian Ellipse

The Meridian Ellipse is a single wireless speaker from the British high-end manufacturer Meridian, and the shape is functional rather than decorative: the elliptical cabinet is designed to reduce internal resonance and edge diffraction.

Inside are two 90 mm drivers either side of a 150 mm racetrack bass driver, with around 80 watts of amplification split between them. It is about 42 cm wide and quotes a room response of roughly 40 Hz to 20 kHz.

What Apple Home actually does with it

This is an AirPlay 2 speaker rather than a HomeKit accessory.

• It appears in the Home app as a speaker you can play to, and as an AirPlay target in Control Centre.
• You can assign it to a room and group it with HomePods for synchronised multi-room audio.
• Siri can send music to it by room name.
• It can be the audio output in a scene or an automation.

You cannot switch it on or set its volume from the Home app the way you would a light. Those stay with the speaker and its own app.

Connections

Unusually for a wireless speaker it takes wired sources too: USB-C up to 192 kHz/24-bit, mini-TOSLINK optical, and a 3.5 mm analogue input with its own converter. Alongside AirPlay 2 it carries Bluetooth 5.3, Google Cast, TIDAL Connect, Spotify Connect and Roon Ready certification.

Before you buy

Roon Ready is worth noting if you run a Roon library, because few one-box speakers are certified.

At around £1,900 it is competing with a pair of good active speakers rather than with a smart speaker. Hear it against that before deciding.

Specifications