Sooloos music server: Anyone hear, anyone a dealer

There were two other servers at CES and THE Show that I thought were better and cheaper than the Sooloos. They were the Exemplar and Blue Smoke. The Exemplar uses a wireless tablet touch screen but, as shown, did not use the available cover art as the designer wanted to hold down as much as possible on the use of the processor. Nevertheless, if you want it you can just down load it from the internet. The Blue Smoke was showing cover art of what was playing. I never saw any more display than that, but they were selecting from a tablet also.

There is no reason why you could not have 1 terabyte drives in the Exemplar which was using .75 terabyte drives. The Blue Smoke had a wireless 4 terabyte drive sitting across the room.

I heard several servers at the show but these two were the best. I ordered an Exemplar. It was being used both in the LSA and FIM suites.

Don_s, the Exemplars were in FIM and LSA suites. The Blue Smoke was in the Rockport suite at THE Show.

Swampwalker, What I saw and heard was very real, but the principles said that it would be several months before it would be in production.

You can call Exemplar at 425 334-4733. The Blue Smoke is another matter. They gave me a preliminary sheet but there is no telephone number on it. Andy Payor at Rockport must know how to get in touch with them.

Both system are multiple units with the possibility of bigger hard-drives and different control computers. Both will allow other dacs. In fact Blue Smoke used two other manufacturer's dacs. The Exemplar uses AES/EBU connections so any dac with a parallel input would work. I think I recall that the Blue Smoke also did not use USB, but I am now uncertain.

Again, I basically went by what I heard comparing the FIM K2 sampler played as a disc and as I remembered it on my system to what I heard on the server.

Davemitchell, the sound is the only thing that is important to me, but convenience is next most important.

VRS and the Memory Player both have the same capabilities as the Sooloos. You can easily add them to the Exemplar although they do not recommend doing so, or at least turning it off when playing music.

Henryhk, I don't think the Memory Player is intended to just be a cd player, but I don't know whether it will allow larger than the .5 terabyte drives they originally offered. I suspect you are right about using an external dac for noise reasons. The Memory Player is to have an external dac. I am not convinced that the Sooloos is as good as either the Exemplar or Blue Smoke. I certainly did not hear otherwise at CES.

Davemitchell, I guess I am more interested in the sound and the ease of selecting what I want, especially if the processor's activity interferes with the sound.

David, I heard it with the MSB. It sounded great.

Ask Ron if he is from ND and went to IIT in Chicago.

In my opinion the Sooloos is not intended for someone who want fidelity. It is for someone who merely wants the presence of music everywhere. I concede that it is better than the Ipod and looks nice. I just looked at their webpage--good styling, nice pictures, and very little about fidelity or even how the system goes together.

Samsung has a touch screen that can be used with the Exemplar music server. I don't want my server's processor dealing with getting page art at the expense of dealing with sending the music to my dac, so I don't use this capability.