Meridian reinvents its Sooloos whole-house music system

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Meridian reinvents its Sooloos whole-house music system

YESTERDAY from What Hi-Fi?

Sooloos Control 10

Meridian has completely reinvented the system architecture of its Sooloos multiroom music storage and playback system, bringing enhanced flexibility and processing power, as well as making it simpler to start building a system.

The company says that 'The latest generation, called Sooloos 2.0, brings a host of improvements and additions to the system, from simple interface enhancements to major changes in system capabilities, zone playback and hardware options

With due modesty, Meridian co-founder Bob Stuart says. "It’s quite brilliant actually: the new design allows the interface to handle literally 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.”

What's more, you can start a Sooloos system with just a Control 10 controller and a Twinstore storage unit, with the SpeakerLink connection of the controller fed directly to a pair of Meridian DSP speakers.

The system now also offers local streaming, with Firefox, IE or Safari web browsers on any Mac, PC or Linux computer able to control the system, and play music through the speakers of the computer.
That means any computer can act as a Sooloos zone.

And you get remote streaming, too, with remote internet access to the system from any web browser anywhere with a high-speed connection.
So you could play your music in the office, or even thousands of miles away on holiday or business.

In addition, dedicated Control PC and Control Mac programmes will let the remote computer import or export files, import CDs or do manual system backups. And while the system imports music in full-quality lossless form, it also generates MP3 versions, for use on portable devices.

Files can also be imported as FLAC, WAV, MP3, AAC or Apple Lossless, at anything up to 24-bit/96kHz, and the system now has improved handling of classical music, for example recognising that several tracks of a CD may constitute the movements of a single work.