CEDIA 2007: Escient’s FireBall Music Server
September 13th, 2007 — By Christopher Jones
September 13 - Escient’s FireBall music server is one of the smoothest music servers I’ve seen and heard, so I was anxious to check out the company’s newest Vision media servers.
The VS-100 and VS-200 are designed to consolidate your audio, video, and photo collections into one library, which can be accessed from multiple rooms around the house.
Both servers support five independent streams, so you could have a movie playing in one room, music in another, and a photo slideshow (with soundtrack) in yet another.
The VS-100 has a 1TB drive, the VS-200 has dual 1TB drives, and both servers can rip unencrypted DVDs (to MPEG-2 and 4) and store standard and high-def recordings with RAID 1 backup.
The new servers upscale DVDs and photos to 1080p, and the main onscreen user interface also looks great when displaying menus and cover art in high-def.
The servers can control CD/DVD megachangers (and those movies appear in your library right alongside files stored on hard disk) but they won’t distribute (protected) DVD content to other rooms; only stored content can be streamed.
Both servers have HDMI 1.3/component/S-video outputs, as well as digital and optical audio outputs. In order to set up multi-room streaming, you need the new VC-1 networked media player, which receives audio and video streams from the VS-100 and VS-200 servers.
For music buffs, the new servers also support the Rhapsody music service, with its 4 millions songs available for streaming. The VS-100 ($4,000), VS-200 ($6,000), and VC-1 ($2,000) will be available in December.
