Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Some Positives of Sooloos

OK, it is far from perfect, but there ARE plenty of good aspects with Sooloos (pretty obvious really as we are not planning to sell it). Here are a few that come to my mind:

* Superb audio quality (and I'm guessing Sooloos heads the server pack with this)
* Convenience for random play - over many more CDs than any multi CDP (but maybe no better than some servers)
* Tagging facility (means you can select or random play within personally chosen tags)
* Some good PC editing functions (limited but ....)
* Enables one to quickly find music one is in the mood for - let Sooloos random select, then either let it continue OR stop it to play a whole disc - ergonomically easy with the touchscreen

I am listening to far, far more music in the collection here than ever before. One advantage of CDs over LPs is their potential to play for 70 minutes compared to 25 minutes BUT the downside of that it that over an hour of some music can be tedious. A multi CDP overcomes that but not very well with all the distracting clunking with changing of discs. A server system like Sooloos frees us the collection so tracks can be chose from hundreds rather than dozens.

John

I enjoy my Sooloos but I do feel that the other companies are catching up and overtaking. The Aurender looks vastly superior from a technical point of view as a stand alone network free unit (my obsession) server to rival the Control 15

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/Aurender-S10-Music-Server-Review

The new Pathos is just so gawd damn sexy

http://www.audiostream.com/content/pathos-acoustics-musiteca

and the Sonos system is making headway at CES as the system to have for household integration. Sadly Logitech have chosen not to renew/upgrade the Transporter so the system is falling out of favour. Naim however are making huge inroads.

I've also noted the new unit from Micromega which is Airplay compatible, allowing wireless streaming from any Apple device.

http://www.micromega-hifi.com/airstream.html?PHPSESSID=f7ce52c16c0c823a6a343ebe90b84f27

Meridian have produced some fine new products, including the long overdue iPad interface BUT IMHO they need to get the Sooloos enabled M80 to market, and quickly!

Steve

here's my quick take :

Sooloos is fast, and scalable (through 1,000 or 2,000 or 10,000 CD's at it if you own them)

The metadata integration is deep, and the Control GUI is smart about allowing you to drill down on the stuff you own and see connections between artists, musicians, etc. The genre and sub-genre classification is very accurate, dBpoweramp and iTunes doesn't end up as accurate.

The album art (larger than 500x500) is gorgeous to look at across the room on the Control.

The ripper in the Control is handy if you are not a AccurateRip freak (sadly, I am).

The rhapsody integration is nice.

The incremental backup functionality seems reliable so far.

On large collections, the Swim and Focus functionality is really nice to have. I like the Comms integration, too. more than I would have thought....

For me, the Sooloos hooks up to the ID40. That was by far the main reason that I got it. Otherwise my Sonos was just fine.

Unless something else can give me the equivalent audio quality, I would not consider anything else.

Aloha,