Stereophile has posted its products of the year awards. Some of the components included in the list are:
- Sooloos music server system ($7,900–10,500)
- KEF Reference 207/2 floorstanding speakers ($20,000/pair)
- Revel Ultima Salon2 floorstanding speakers ($22,000/pair)
- Rega Planar 3-24 turntable and RB-301 tonearm ($895–1,295)
- Conrad-Johnson ACT2 Series 2 preamplifier ($16,500)
- Parasound Halo JC 2 preamplifier ($4,000)
- Paradigm Atom v.5 bookshelf loudspeakers ($298/pair)
Read the entire article, then tell me if you’re planning to spend $10K on a Sooloos music server. Personally, I think you could get the same advantages with a good laptop, basic external storage, and a nice DAC. The $5,000 you save could buy a lot of music…
Hi Mark – You hit the nail on the head with this one.
“Personally, I think you could get the same advantages with a good laptop, basic external storage, and a nice DAC. The $5,000 you save could buy a lot of music…”
Ditto.
If your really savy, one can save alot more than 5k!
benchmark come to anyone’s mind (with a laptop of course)
If you read the actual reviews, the list seems slightly contradictory.
As someone who DOES own a Sooloos, and has used most of the rest (Sonos, Squeezebox, Transporter, McIntosh MS750 etc. etc.) where the Sooloos really excels is in the management of a large collection. If you just have 500-1000 CD’s the Sooloos is definitely overkill and the extra dough would probably be better spent on more music (or a vacation for that matter)
But with a large collection, the Sooloos really comes into it’s own. It’s just so much easier to work your way around a lot of music with a Sooloos than anything else out there.
And the Sooloos is really great if you let your friends and family play with it. I’ve had a dozen other music servers in my living room over the last year and a half, including an iMac with Cover Flow and no one touched it.
So it does depend on your music collection and usage habits. The other thing the Sooloos does that is an expensive feature, but worth it in my opinion is its ability to automatically back up to a second set of drives at the same time.
Not having to worry about backing up, tagging, getting album art, etc really makes the Sooloos handy. Yeah the price tag is on the high side, but if you want convenience it’s the only way to fly. To use it is to love it.
Besides, when you spend more time with a Squeezebox looking for the music you want to listen to than it takes to dig out a CD, what’s the point?
Jeff
I would have thought that 500-1000 CD is a large collection! I can see the plus side of the Sooloos but the price is high and the plus is not in the sound but in the GUI. For anyone with a “small” collection of less then a 1000 CD or budget limitations the SB works fine and spending a bit of time getting the tags right is a fine way to revisit some old cd we have forgotten about. Certainly for me (a SB3 user) I can get to my CD much quicker then using them physically and can do things I can’t do with normal CD (such as setting up play lists to compare classical performances movement by movement).
Also the auto back up you talk about can be set up on any PC without to much hassle or you can just back up to an external drive every few days.
Steve Rogers