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Meridian sooloos, Olive 6HD, ??

Confused with choices. What music server to buy? Budget $2500-$4000 new or used. Looked at Olive and Meridian. The exterior of the Olive 6HD disc slot has the aesthetics (puke green) of a Fischer Price toy (what were they thinking?). I want a screen and disc drive to copy my large CD collection to build-in hard drive and ability to add backup hard drive. Plan to use iPad Mini for control. Keeping my SACD player for my large SACD collection but ideally would like to copy my SACD's to disc and put SACD's in storage with my CD collection but not possible with current SACD copyright restrictions.
bgeofft-duplicate-0
bgeofft-duplicate-0 OP
174 posts
 
Forget the colors and get either one or the other and enjoy the tunes.

Yeah George you're right. The music matters most.
crion's avatar
crion
9 posts
 
Vhiner, this is exactly the reason why I got the Meridian Sooloos system. I'm keeping the headaches to a minimum and still enjoy reference sound. Using the 800 reference series as audio endpoint in my system and the MC200 as my store/core. It's good for about 2500 CD's and when more is needed I can add an MD600 store or several for the largest collections.

Example of a Reference setup:
Meridian 818V2(streamer/preamp) or 808.5 (CD/streamer/preamp)
Meridian MD600 4TB storage/core with two mirrored 3.5" HDD
iPad generation 4

High-End setup:
Meridian MS600 (streamer with high-end DAC)
Meridian MC200 1TB fanless storage/core/audio endpoint
iPad generation 4

Starting setup:
Meridian MC200 1TB storage/core/audio endpoint
iPad generation 4

This is all it takes. And the server maintenance is just keeping a current backup from time to time on a NAS or HDD.

Sorry for the sales pitch, but you really can have the cake and eat it. :D
vhiner
544 posts
 
Crion,

The reference system *must* be good because you rarely see the package at an affordable used price. Or have I been asleep at the wheel?
kedoades
251 posts
 
Hi I have been following this thread with great interest. I am looking at getting a media server also, I don't care about the color, I care about the sound, what about the music vault media servers, how do they stack up againts the big company media servers
camb
164 posts
 
I have the greater storage option of the "High End Set-Up" of the Meridian Sooloos system above.

MD600 - 2 TB RAID back-up storage/system core
MS600 - audio endpoint/dac
Simaudio 650D dac/transport
Simaudio P-8/W-8
Revel Studio 2

I can say that the dac in the MS600 is on par with the very well reviewed Simaudio 650D dac. Slightly different "flavours" of sound, but the difference is subtle at best. I can't wait for Meridian to offer their high end ID41 card (the one in the Meridian 818) in a Sooloos endpoint option without the pre-amp, which I don't need, at a more realistic price!

I tried the Simaudio 180 MInD streamer as well using Access as a library management software tool. Although the Sim streamer sounded very good, the Sooloos software is still lightyears ahead, and I stuck with Sooloos because of that.
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