Sooloos music server: Anyone hear, anyone a dealer

The music server is a great thing that adds new perspectives to music you may have heard many times before.

I have been rediscovering parts of my music collection that I other wise might not listen to often with my new music server set up.

I often now find myself putting the Roku in random selection mode within or across genres and let the 1300+ tunes flow. You hear music from a different perspective and make new discoveries by not having any pre-conceptions or album context in mind when a particular tune comes on.

For vinyl, I currently record to CD-R first and then rip to the server. In the future, I may go with a direct to disk/file recorder or ADC and avoid the CD-R, though having the disk copy for safe storage and use in the car isn't bad.

Albert, I agree that there will lower cost Sooloos like servers coming our way...I just cld not wait. LCD panel prices are plummeting and will do so more again over the next yr as there is excessive production capacity in Asia where most of them are made. The same thing can be said for memory.

However, I do think the Sooloos interface and touch screen is vastly more convenient than a notebook PC based solution, Mac or PC. I find a bigger screen makes things easier to access and browse, the Swimming function excellent, and available memory of course is vastly bigger.

Unless I'm missing something one of the funny things about this thread is theat Henryhk has one of the best DACs that exist at any price. EMM Labs DCC2 SE DA converter.

For Gods Sake Man - plug in the Sooloos into your DAC! :)

Okay - ignoring that aspect for now, my commentary on this is the following:

1) For people to whom 500 is a lot of money, i.e., they optimize their system not to spend 500 extra here or there, the Sooloos is a no-go on price - even if 10k on one component is okay, as you are paying for redundant and non-optimized capability. What it offers for price is not competitive with what you can build off the shelf.

2) It has an interface that can't be beat today, hands down.

3) For people with 20k+ DACs already :), and tons of CDs, and they want a turnkey solution, and perhaps don't have a lot of detailed computer experience, this is an extremely easy and efficient way to go. Probably the best one.

Now, for me, my recommendation is that they sell another product that is the same as what they have now except it has no DAC at all, and no storage. It should be 3k, maybe 4. You plug in your own DAC and your own storage, and now we have a system that is optimized price/performance at a much more constrained level.

On Jitter - if you have a DAC that re-clocks (Benchmark, Berkeley Alpha, the new Bryston, etc) then Jitter doesn't matter from your source as the signal will be re-built inside the DAC.

Lightminer...I do exactly that...that's my pt. But I also know its question of money so was trying to contribute the discussion in another manner.

Okay - good. The planets and stars are aligned once again :)....