Premiere Design

Long scoffed at by audiophiles, music servers are now gaining widespread acceptance for their convenience and sound quality. Among the most highly regarded products in this category is Sooloos from British high-end stalwart Meridian, which just announced two new members of the Sooloos family—the Control 15 server and Media Source 600 client.

The Control 15 combines three functions—CD ripping/storage, playback, and control—in a single unit. A 17-inch touchscreen provides a beautiful and intuitive graphical user interface that lets you easily find the music you want—as well as the music you had forgotten you owned—and play all the selections that suit a particular mood or occasion. The internal 500GB hard drive can store up to 1000 CDs in lossless format along with MP3 versions that can be exported to portable players, and an Ethernet port connects to the Internet for access to album art and other metadata about the stored CDs as well as online radio stations and music from Rhapsody.

A standard S/PDIF digital output can be connected to any audio system, or the Control 15 can connect directly to any of Meridian's DSP speakers using the proprietary SpeakerLink interface. In addition to the touchscreen, the system can be controlled from a Meridian MSR+ system or from a free iPhone/iPad app.

To expand the system to remote zones, Meridian offers the new Media Source 600, which connects to the home network and streams audio from any Sooloos server in the system. Outputs include SpeakerLink for Meridian DSP speakers and RCA S/PDIF digital audio as well as balanced and unbalanced analog. Like the Control 15, the MS600 includes a comprehensive suite of Meridian audio processing, such as high-quality upsampling and an ultra-stable clock for the lowest possible jitter, and it can be controlled in all the same ways.

The Control 15 will set you back $7500—less than previous generations with the same functionality—and each MS600 adds $3500 to the system cost. That's a lot of dough, but I have no doubt it's a worthwhile investment. As Jon Iverson noted in his review of the original version for Stereophile, "Using the Sooloos got me more deeply involved with my music library than at any time since I began collecting many years ago. Sign me up. My disc players are history."