Every once in a while a new product drops onto the market that I find really exciting — Sooloos is one of those products. To be honest at the time of writing it has not been officially released onto the Australian market, but it should be here by the time you get to read this. I initially saw (and played with) this product 18 months ago at the CEDIA show in Denver USA, and I was blown away. It has taken some time for them to evolve from that prototype version of what I saw, and since then the company has been purchased by Meridian of the UK (they will continue to market the product under the Sooloos name.)

In a nutshell, Sooloos is a high-quality media server, a product which will store all of your music (up to 6,000 CDs) — plus a whole lot more. There are many alternatives to Sooloos — most of them less expensive. What makes Sooloos unique is its stunning performance (no compression), quietness (no fans) and an amazingly intuitive interface. The Sooloos is an absolute dream to use.

The heart of the Sooloos system is the 17-inch LCD touch screen. This displays album covers, artists profiles, play lists etc. You can access music by artist or genre. Select a disc and play the entire album or select your desired track. Type in an artist’s name and access not only the albums recorded by that artist, but also any albums in your collection that he/she has played on. There are a number of storage options available depending on the size of your collection, and the system can be networked up to 32 different zones.

Each zone is independent to the next — i.e. you can be playing classical in the bedroom, jazz by the pool and rock in the living area. While retaining the integrity of the original recording for quality playback, the Sooloos system will also make a 192kbps file for transfer to your iPod. As well as their own controllers, the system can be controlled by Crestron control systems, PC web browsers, or even your Apple iPhone or Touch.

As if this is not enough, it is also about to get better. Future upgrades of Sooloos include its ability to stream via the internet, allowing access to your favourite internet radio station, or to stream music from sources such as Rhapsody, giving you immediate access — for a fee — to almost every album ever recorded.

Following this, Sooloos intend to release a further upgrade allowing you to store video in the same fashion as it currently stores music. As I said earlier, there are alternative, and less expensive, ways of storing and then retrieving your music collection. None will sound as good as this, and certainly none are as much fun to use.