Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Will M discontinue Sooloos?

It would be a brave manufacturer (some might say foolish) of streaming HiFi who gave total access control to Roon or any other company outside there ownership.

Nicely stated.

For what it's worth, I bought a lifetime subscription for Roon, but still use Sooloos as my primary system. (I don't use Tidal either.)

(My Roon server has Control:PC installed with native export sent to the Roon watched folder - all media added to Sooloos pops up on Roon, occasionally used as a headphone zone.)

Original reason - checked before release that multi-channel cards could be used as multi-zone (i.e. like the Ensemble) - that didn't seem to make it to release, so I stuck with Sooloos and I eventually accumulated enough Sooloos zones that it wasn't important enough to look into again (or find where I'd put the cards I'd bought).

Sooloos is more streamlined and I can get straight to the music I want quicker (e.g. onscreen keyboard doesn't change position / keys while typing) not to mention that I can split systems and have a separate system with just my favourites installed (tag favorites, selective backup and restore to standalone remote system - no internet connection required).

Only slight annoyance with Sooloos - importing - would be nice to have an option to allow import when remote servers unavailable to allow import when you are nowhere near the internet, or the occasional outage (and as reassurance against future 'end-of-service') Also useful for bulk import of audio when you already know it's not in the database.

Shame with the price drop on the MC200, they didn't make the drop slightly less and switch to SSD at the same time (if people can hear the difference between interconnects on an MHR encrypted link, surely the spinning disk must be several supernovas worth of night and day difference...).

Legacy / antiquated is also known as 'tried and tested'.

Matt.

Hear hear, it's very expensive.

Maybe that's partly why M let them go? WIth Sooloos M could only monetize their continued R&D through hardware sales. You need to equate the cost of a Sooloos (Core) product as two elements: the cost of the hardware; and a lifetime subscription to free Sooloos updates (or until M went bust/stopped developing/switched off the metadata).

If M underestimated the value of the latter then they'd start losing money (or not making as much profit) on the whole business.

Roon have a much better shot at making it outside the closed architecture of M's hardware, and also have the luxury of knowing exactly what their revenues and expenditure are. They are attracting many multiples of subscribers over just ex Sooloos users, however they do need a turnkey solution for non techies. They're getting this from third party providers without the need to get over involved in hardware.

I wonder what percentage of Sooloos users have now switched to Roon? If I knew how to I could create a poll to get a small representative sample, but I'd guess on this forum that the result would overstate the % of switchers. Circa 100% of the members of this forum know of the existence of Roon whereas the real figure will be lower.

There was a poll last year. Can't find any link although an image was in the gallery.

Results are below.



Interesting to see how results have changed over the year.

I've just created a new poll. Closes in one month on May 26th.

That's what put me off going down the Sooloos route - even including a lifetime's licence, the hardware wasn't cheap and it was far too restrictive.

Just to add a little to this point...

A few years back we published details here on HH about how you could point LMS (Squeeze boxes) as the MD600 STORE and run the same library. That was if you ripped in a proper ripper and not Control:PC or C15.

That meant still running two cores. But it was the best we could do to break out of the closed system.

The comment about architecture is key here and also explains why Sooloos 3.0 (as it once was... fact... I know this as I was alpha testing it) became Roon.

Compare the closed vs open systems...
Roon runs on Windows, OSX and now Linux.
It runs on iOS and Android handhelds.
It reads ALL music files (FLAC, DSF, DFF, MP3 etc.) stored on practically ANY connected or network device with folders that a user can actually recognise.
It feeds Meridian end-points (MS200, MS600, ID40/ID41 etc.) as well as Airplay devices, Squeezeboxes and a host of other network and USB devices.

=One system.

If you look back at some of the wish-list items for Sooloos (e.g. track level data) this is what Roon does.

Don't get me wrong... I was a big fan of Sooloos and still have a huge soft-spot for it. Just look at the tools and guides that I/we published on HH. In its day it was absolutely the best solution in a Meridian system.

However, it was hugely expensive and very closed. I still bought into it of course. No regrets at all.

I think that Roon is a spectacularly good evolution of Sooloos. Feeding music into my various end-points is rock-solid (Meridian, AppleTV, Squeeze).

Into the 808v6/ID41 results in SQ that is just stunning. I love it !!

I like to think that it is the perfect combination of two groups doing what they are best at.

If people are happy with what Sooloos does today then fantastic. It is still a great solution. HQ may do stuff with Sooloos... who knows... we don't hear any more about that than anyone else these days.

If people like Roon they can run both or switch over. Choice is a good thing here. It doesn't need to be a tribal issue.

I wonder whether the next step is for M to produce a streamer with RAAT.

Probably a step too far in the short-to-medium term.

Compared to RAAT the Meridian Sooloos protocol is quite limited, it's overdue for an update.

If Meridian launched RAAT endpoints (not restricted to just 96kHz) that would be the icing on the cake.

A step too far? Maybe but Meridian make some of the very best audio hardware on the planet ... so why not... it may just open up new markets for them.

Regards,
Carl

We can but hope. If M don't go down that route others are likely to fill the gap. If the new Bryston pie gets RAATed, I may be tempted