A year or so ago I was lurking a bit on the 'Meridian Unplugged' forum and noting that what I'd call the 'middle users' were complaining about getting short shrift. This mirrors what's going on in society - the middle classes are being hollowed out. The top branch of the market is most certainly growing in revenue terms, but simply jacking up the prices without delivering any more innovation (coz the top end customers are becoming less and less interested in quality) must become disheartening for the design engineers. Doing some budget products like this one could be just the thing to stop them leaving.
From what it says above the products are from the same dealers as ever before. I wonder how they'll get significant volumes going that route though as this DAC has much broader appeal than the expensive stuff. If it goes online direct then existing dealers will get pissed off very quickly - I doubt Meridian has the clout to control the selling price with Amazon. Hence my puzzlement.
Here's a diagram to illustrate what bifurcation looks like to a chaos systems theorist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LogisticMap_BifurcationDiagram.png