06/05/2009 Sooloos – sexy, convenient and Audiophile quality!

Tagged under distributed audio, Hard drive recorder, Networking, sooloos
Posted by Trevor Rooney | 2 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are not many terms that audiophiles fear more than the term ‘MP3’, no matter how it’s used and in what context it tends to turn people off very quickly.

 

So why is this I hear you ask, what is the issue?

 

Let me take you back to the 1970’s and 80’s for the answer.

 

What do you think of when you read the word Hoover?

I’m betting the picture in your mind is a generic vacuum cleaner and not a specific brand. When I grew up we tended to Hoover the carpet no matter what brand of vacuum cleaner we had.

 

Do you see what I am getting at; do you see how easy it is to blanket a product with a term that just sticks in your mind forever?

 

How does this relate to MP3? Well let’s just say that MP3 suffers from the same problem, people tend use this term to cover all forms of digital music no matter what’s its origin.

 

My goal is to set the record straight, MP3 describes one form of compressed music that in reality sounds pretty average. It came about in the early 90’s as people started to push what computers could do in terms of the playback of music.MP3 allowed an average of 200 songs to be compressed onto a standard CD.

 

Back then space was a premium and the goal was to compress as much as possible to dazzle people with high numbers of sounds ready to play. Remember that people appear to see better than they can hear so big claims from the likes of portable MP3 player manufactures were warmly greeted.

 

All this was going on much to the scorn of Audiophiles whom dismissed the concept of digital music completely.

 

So over the years what has happened to bring about change?

Well the main thing is that hard drive storage now virtually costs nothing which in turn has meant more development in this field. Literally MP3 evolved and became FLAC.

 

Free Lossless Audio Codec is a system that can turn a CD into about half its normal size with no audible degradation. This means that if we were to encode FLAC onto a CD we would get maybe 25 songs give or take, not really that impressive in terms of an ad campaign. Can you imagine the launch of every ones favorite MP3 player telling the world it could store 140 songs in total!!!.

  

 Sooloos aims to re-educate everyone safe in the knowledge that what they have produced is the best sounding hard drive solution in the world using FLAC as their encoder.

 

The aim of Sooloos was simple, design a system that gives audiophile results with hard drive convenience.

 

 So once Sooloos worked out that encoding music onto a hard drive with this new lossless codec worked very well they had to figure out how the end result could be managed in a normal listening environment with no computer in sight.

 

i.e. we have a hard drive source that we connect to our normal amplifier like we would a CD player but how can we control and select what we cannot see?

 

One of the biggest gripes from the detractors has been this point, staring at a small hand held remote or worse still watching a scrolling text based device telling us what we had in our library was not that attractive.  They wanted something tangible, they wanted to be able to read the liner notes and learn about what they heard. The best of both worlds I hear you say!!.

 

 Of course the clever people at Sooloos took this into account and have provided their systems with a stunning 20” LCD touch screen that not only displays your complete library in glorious colour but also allows you read all about the artists and even gives you reviews if needed at the touch of a finger. You can create play lists based on type of genre or to the extreme of selecting particular musician’s performances on multiple albums.

How about a night of movie soundtracks or maybe even blues pre 1970? It’s all here ready to go with the greatest of ease.

 

This truly is a very rich experience and one that I ask everyone to come and take a look and listen to. Don’t fear we are not trying to convert the masses here; we’ll leave that decision to you.

 

What we are trying to do is let you have a glimpse of how exciting music can be again.

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