Home media developer Sooloos is one of those companies mainly known to custom installers for its high-end multi-room home music system…and known to customers for their slick 17-inch touch panel control system called the Control:One. Today, the company announced it is expanding its offerings to a full-fledged product line, enabling “entry-level users” to get into the Sooloos world. Of course, a high-end home media developer’s idea of “entry level” pricing may not quite match the ideas of a consumer electronics shopper who walks the aisles as Wal-mart…but sometimes it’s good to know how the one percent of the population that controls ninety percent of the world’s wealth might live.
Among Sooloos’s new hardware offerings are the Sooloos Ensemble, a $3,500 multi-room audio hub that offers four unbalanced stereo outputs and on S/PDIF output for streaming multiple Sooloos audio feeds to different rooms at the same time. The unit features a removable drive bay that can handle up to 1 TB in storage, and users can manage their Sooloos system using the Control:One 17-inch LCD touchscreen panel or any one of a number of third-party controls and PC-based systems.
Need more storage? The $2,500 Sooloos Twinstore is a single unit with two removable drive mechanisms that can handle up to 1 TB of storage each; you can buy drives from Sooloos directly or dealers and customers can install them from any source they like.
If you love your music but still have it locked away on CDs, the new $800 Sooloos Import:One is a 25-disc USB-enabled CD autoloader that can connect to any computer on a network with Sooloos. Users load up the unit, press “Import,” and the Sooloos does all the work of pulling your CDs into the Sooloos system.
Sooloos has also announced enhancements to its Control:One software for PCs, including interface enhancements and improvements to importing CDs from networked computers (perhaps with that Import:One device, above). Users can also now control Sooloos from an iPhone or iPod touch connected to the same network as the Sooloos via Wi-Fi.
