The Sooloos Music Server

I Have Seen the Future

The best technology-based products hide enormous complexity and sophistication behind a simple façade. The product does exactly what the user wants it to do— and nothing more—with the magic that makes this happen remaining transparent.

That’s a perfect description of the Sooloos music server, a product that brings some extremely sophisticated hardware and software design to bear on the problem of managing and accessing a large music library. Unlike many pieces of complex technology, Sooloos couldn’t be easier to use. In fact, Sooloos has the most intuitive user interface of any consumer-electronics product I’ve lived with.

Before getting to the specifics of what Sooloos is and the experience it delivers, I’ll give you a small taste of its capabilities. Imagine your entire CD library displayed as album art on a 17" touchscreen panel. To hear a disc, you simply touch the album art. Suppose you’re not quite sure what you want to listen to, but know that you’re in the mood for some classic jazz. With six finger-taps, Sooloos will display just jazz albums released in the 1950s, or those on the Blue Note label, or those by Miles Davis, for examples. This is just the tip of the iceberg; Sooloos’ ability to instantly sort through your library and present to you exactly the music you want to hear at any particular moment borders on the magical.

The Sooloos server is the brainchild of three acquaintances whose respective talents just happened to overlap in a way that was tailor-made for creating a music server. One was an A&R representative for a major label; another was a record-label owner; the third was a software designer. The three friends all had large and unwieldy music libraries, and had been looking for the market to produce a music server that would satisfy their needs. None of the available servers—which rely on text-based lists for album browsing—was adequate, so they started talking about building the ultimate, no-compromise music server for themselves. The product was conceptualized in 1999, and eventually the three partners launched a full-scale development effort that produced the product under review.

The Sooloos system consists of four pieces of hardware called Control, Source, and Store (a minimum of two Store components is required). The Control component is a 17" touchscreen panel mounted on a pedestal. Its base contains a CD loading slot for importing music into the server. The Source contains the computing power, and also incorporates the digital-toanalog converters and analog-output stage. As its name suggests, Store stores the audio files on hard-disk drives. Store devices are available in three ca-pacities: 1, 2, or 3 terabytes. Stores are sold in pairs; one is the primary drive and the second is a constantly updated mirror-image of the primary drive. If a drive fails, you send it back to Sooloos while running your system on the backup drive—no down time. When you put the repaired drive back in, a new mirror image is automatically created. Any number of Stores can be added for unlimited capacity. A 1TB Store will hold about 3000 CDs. Multiple Control units can be scattered throughout your home, connected through Ethernet cables. A PC application also allows you to access music files from, for example, a laptop in the bedroom. For $1000 more, the Source:Five provides four additional outputs that allow for five simultaneous and/or independent streams of music. Multiple Source components can be combined for up to 32 independent music streams.

Sooloos’ industrial design is outstanding; the custom hardware, particularly in the Control component, is elegant and robustly built. The Store and Source components are designed to be left powered-up, but you should know that they produce a considerable amount of heat.

The price for a core system consisting of a Control, Source, and pair of 1TB Store components is $12,900. The system requires an always-on Internet connection. When you insert a CD into the Control’s slot to import to the hard drive, Sooloos downloads the album art and meta-data about that disc from the Internet (specifically, from All Media Guide). In addition to the usual meta-data (album credits, playing times, track titles, release date,etc.), Sooloos downloads brief reviews as well. Being an Internet-enabled device allows Sooloos to download updated software and add features for existing users.

Unlike most servers that provide the option of lower bit rates to increase storage capacity, Sooloos operates with a fixed encoding scheme that delivers CD-quality audio. Specifically, it uses FLAC (Free Audio Lossless Codec), a lossless compression algorithm that provides perfect bit-for-bit accuracy to the source. FLAC encoding realizes about a 25–40% reduction in the bit rate with no loss of quality. There’s a misperception among some in the high-end than lossless coding somehow degrades sound quality. Although I’m the last person to dogmatically cling to the idea that identical bitstreams will always sound identical, lossless coding produces no audible degradation. In fact, music streamed from Sooloos sounds better than the same music played back on a state-of-the-art CD transport (see the accompanying article “Do Hard-Disk Drives Sound Better than CD?”).