Ayre CX-7 vs. Meridian G08 ?

My G08 went back to the importer and I don't recommend this player...
I had picked up this machine after an extensive market review and listening (didn't have chance to listen to Ayre though). The sound stage is huge, and it is really musical, clear and extended in the highs.
The problem I faced is that with around 10% of my CD collection (they're all originals) the transport was noisy, vibrating, sometimes shaking my stands...
I returned the unit with one of the defective CDs for Meridan to study. They said that using this CD the behaviour could be reproduced on all their G08 in stock. I had tested the CD in many other players (Copland, Samsung DVD, Electrocompaniet, some esoteric player using Philips drive, my computer CD-rom...) and never had any issue.

I quote Meridian anwser :"The complaint regarding the vibration coming from the G08 is due to the following problems. The disc appears to be badly manufactured in that possibly the hole and data are not completely centered on the disc, or the disc is slightly warped.This results in the disc spinning not occurring smoothly causing air turbulence and resulting in the low rumbling noise. The reason that this isnot a problem with most CD players is that they spin the disc at 1X speed which is around 200rpm to 500rpm, depending on where the head is positioned on the disc, where as we spin the disc at 4X which results in the disc spinning at around 800rpm to 2000rpm. We can do this because we read the audio data digitally from the disc whereas most players read audio in an analogue form which the drive generates, which enforces 1X. Spinning the disc at the greater speed allows for the drive to re-read bad sectors on the disc if a problem is encountered. It also allows for buffering of the audio to ensure no dropouts. The reason the customer complains that the noise goes away after track 6 is because the drive uses Constant Liner Velocity where the disc spins faster when reading the inner tracks, then slows down for the outer tracks so slowing the disc down. This then causes a lower rpm on high track numbers making the noise quieter. (...)

My solution would be for the customer to back up the disc onto a CDR and use this disc which will not have the manufacturing issues."

To me this is a major design weakness if your player cannot accept CDs that are not 100% perfect, and none are given the industrial process variations (except maybe XRCDs) !

I could stand with this and worry everytiem I buy a CD that I will have to back it up on a CDR to listen to it in my high end player...

Drubin, this resolves by changing my CDP to another model. Sorry but eventhough I enjoyed the musicality of my G08 now I turned to another brand. Actually my dealer has been kind enough to take the meridian back and I kept the model he had sent to me for replacement, it is a french brand named Eera (used to be called Helios in the past), model is DL1. The new CDP doesn't have XLR outputs though, and I guess this migth be one of the reasons why I don't have the soundstage of the meridian through my Jeff Rowland Concentra 2.
Anyway it still has some kind of magical "analog" sound and I enjoy it... waiting to upgrade to DL2 with XLR that will be released in a few months.

I had always been skeptical in our audiophile world about products with a CD-ROM drive (but impressed by the Meridian sound), and now I am back to a Philips drive.

Islandear, I had sligth issues with around 10% of my CDs on the G08. But in particular one of them was making the Meridian and my Atacam stands shake like hell : it was "Oscar Perterson we get requests" by Verve, a CD I own for many years and worked well on all my previous players. A brand new Molly johnson CD also had issues. I own 2 original CDs of "Norah Jones Come away with me" (my gf and I bougth it) : one had the issue and not the other. Really is a question of tolerances, I guess.