Meridian has debuted a series of updates that dramatically increase the power and flexibility of the Meridian Sooloos media-management system.
The Meridian Sooloos system is designed to create a centralized, shared source of music for everyone in the home with an architecture that takes away the worry and hassle of backup, organization, and access for the entire family. The latest generation, called Sooloos 2.0, brings a host of improvements and additions to the music system from simple interface enhancements to major changes in system capabilities, zone playback, and hardware options.
“We have completely reinvented the system architecture of Sooloos so that it can address massive numbers of files,” Meridian’s co-founder, chairman and chief technology officer, Bob Stuart, said. “It’s quite brilliant actually, the new design allows the interface to literally handle hundreds of thousands of files with the same speed and flexibility as just one hundred – a critical point when considering online and other media types.”
A Control 10 can now be combined with a Twinstore alone to create a system with the complete Sooloos experience. This two-piece system provides reliability, interface, automatic backup, massive storage, and sound quality.
Setup is simple; users can attach the SpeakerLink connection of the Control 10 directly to Meridian DSP Loudspeakers, creating a complete digital audio system.
Meridian Sooloos now offers local streaming. Any Mac, PC, or Linux web browser can access and control the system. At the same time, the speakers of any computer controlling the system can be used to play music from it.
The system also features remote streaming. Users can access the home Meridian Sooloos system through a web browser with a high-speed connection, and stream music to a computer. At the office, in a hotel, at a friend’s home, or on vacation, music is always available through the web.
Meridian Sooloos can now be controlled from Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms, so that any computer – even new Linux-based Netbooks – can become a control point for Meridian Sooloos. The dedicated Control PC and Control Mac programs offer the same control benefits as web browsers, with the addition of full CD importing, file importing, file exporting, and manual backup from any Macintosh or Windows computer on the network.
Meridian Sooloos imports music in full-quality, lossless form for listening at home. It also generates MP3s of the files for portable use, eliminating the need to import and maintain two libraries. With the new Meridian Sooloos virtual file structure, any computer on the network will automatically access Meridian Sooloos as a shared library after installing Control PC or Control Mac. The result is seamless and simple transfer of music to iPhones, iPods, and other portable MP3 players, with no special setup requirements.
Meridian Sooloos supports the import of FLAC, WAV, MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless files, at any word length and sample rate up to 24-bit, 96 kHz. With Control PC and Control Mac, files located on your computer are easily imported and identified, acquiring the metadata with automated tools.
Meridian Sooloos manages music libraries through a simple tool called Focus. Classical music presents unique issues to Focus — for example that four tracks out of twelve on a CD may represent the four movements of one composition. Meridian Sooloos now embraces this as well as other challenging aspects of browsing Classical Music.
One of the most innovative aspects of the Meridian Sooloos interface is the ability to sort a wide array of options including but not limited to genre, title, artist, or producer — any of the metadata the system holds can be used to locate data.
