  The holographic dual of a finite-temperature gauge theory with a small number
of flavours typically contains D-brane probes in a black hole background. We
have recently shown that these systems undergo a first order phase transition
characterised by a `melting' of the mesons. Here we extend our analysis of the
thermodynamics of these systems by computing their free energy, entropy and
energy densities, as well as the speed of sound. We also compute the meson
spectrum for brane embeddings outside the horizon and find that tachyonic modes
appear where this phase is expected to be unstable from thermodynamic
considerations.
