Sooloos music server: Anyone hear, anyone a dealer

The Sooloos was being used in a number of rooms and was very impressive. The touch screen interface is superb. It is dramatically more responsive and than most touch screens. The GUI is also the best I have ever seen. I understand that they get the software from AMG Tapestry?

The downside is that they are very expensive. The attention to making good sound is there, but isn't offering performance beyond what you could do with a carefully chosen computer setup and the right associated gear. It's really the excellent touch screen interface, superb GUI, impressive aluminum chassis metal work, and lack of build-it-yourself headaches that you are paying for.

They have the main big system for around $12-13K which can hold up to 3 TB mirrored using off the shelf hard drives housed in their chassis. That includes the beautiful and big touch screen with the CD drive built in to the base.

There is a more basic system that they announced with a max of 1 TB of storage and the same interface and touch screen for around $7K.

Very expensive but very nice. I wanted one.

Just to follow up...I did get to hear a Sooloos running a rather high end system at THE Show (sorry, I can't remember the name of the gear) play some familiar material and the sound quality was easily as good as what you would get from a normal coax digital out on a better than average sound card like an M-Audio or higher into a good D/A.

I agree that listing the jitter at less than 1 nanosecond is as silly as listing my height as less than 100 feet, but from what I heard, it is in a respectable range which is obviously less than 1 nanosecond.

And while I also agree that the unit is very expensive, I cannot imagine a better GUI or touch screen. Nothing I have ever seen comes close. The best off the shelf (now free) software I know of is J. River, and it's nowhere near as nice as this. The Sooloos GUI fills nearly the entire screen with your album artwork sorted by Artist, Genre, or whatever, and makes you feel like you are flipping through your actual CD or LP collection. To me it is the antithesis of "Amazon" or the typical cluttered text-based GUI. Their touch panel is also the first I have experienced to not seem to show any fingerprints even though hundreds, if not thousands, of people had touched the screen with their greasy fingers. And the response time was instantaneous. I guess these things are all in the eye of the beholder.

Yes, very expensive though.

Tbg,

I think that you are focusing on sound quality, which I normally do to, but in the case of the Sooloos, it's all about the interface and software being head and shoulders better than anything else.

All of the typical music server GUI's show you lists of text that make picking through your music collection a very different experience than thumbing though your CD or LP collection. The Sooloos makes you connect with your collection in a way that the others don't

When Henryhk says that his friends come over and get into picking albums and get lost in the fun of it, that's how I felt using the Sooloos at the show.

I have a computer that is set up as a server at home and have tried every GUI possible (if I'm missing a winner let me know). They are mostly text based, and the ones that give you album covers to pick from are amateurish by comparison.

BTW, I am not a dealer for Sooloos. I'd like to see the GUI software made available for everyone to put on their computer. At that point, you'd still be lacking the incredible touchscreen, but it would be a move in the right direction.

VRS and the Memory Player both have the same capabilities as the Sooloos.

No they don't. NOTHING I have seen has the same capabilities as the Sooloos in terms of the quality of the touchscreen and the GUI.

VRS has a website that is basically down and they were using J. River Media software previously (available for free to anyone)...not anywhere near as cool as the Sooloos. And the memory player seems even less like it.