SooloosControl 15, 2 Twin Store'susedSooloos Control 15, 2 Twin Store's Cus Reg Power Supply !SOOLOOS TOP Reference: CONTROL 15, with Custom "One of a Kind SEPERIOR" Regulated Analog Power Supply custom made by Marc Koval, & two Twin Store Drives.This was the REFERENCE Music Server &amp...3695.00

Sooloos Control 15, 2 Twin Store's Cus Reg Power Supply !

Listing ID: lis88hbh Classified 
 Listed  · 2028 Views

davidamb 

member since February 2006

Weinhart Design The AV Experts  Verified Dealer

Last 12 months
All-time291099.5%

4 Watchers

Time Left: None

This listing has ended.

Condition
8/10
Payment methods

Contact seller after sale to pay viaVISA/Mastercard

Ships fromLos Angeles, CA, 90077
Ships toUnited States and Canada
Package dimensionsunspecified
Shipping carrierUPS
Shipping costSpecified after purchase
Original accessoriesBox
AverageResearch Pricing

SOOLOOS TOP Reference:

CONTROL 15, with Custom "One of a Kind SEPERIOR" Regulated Analog Power Supply custom made by Marc Koval, & two Twin Store Drives.


This was the REFERENCE Music Server & Music System for Weinhart Design and a absolute delight Musically, top for Convince and ease of use.

This is a best to be found Sooloos system and ready to be enjoyed.

Remember it was Sooloos who almost single handed made Streaming and Hard Drive Playback an easy thing and re directed many of us to Streaming $ Music Servers done RIGHT.

Has a modular one of kind custom Analog power supply custom made for our Reference System by Marc Koval.

Also comes with two Twin Store Drives upgraded to two TB each.

It is BEST to call David Weinhart for details:

Review: Meridian Sooloos Control 15 Music Server


John Sciacca  | 



image: https://www.soundandvision.com/images/styles/600_wide/public/sv_sooloos_main.jpg?itok=6lpNNV0k

Key Features $7,500 meridian-audio.com/sooloos • 500-gigabyte hard disk stores approximately 1,000 CDs in lossless FLAC format
• 17-inch, 1,280 x 1,024-rez color touchscreen with slot-loading CD drive for importing discs

Simultaneously stores files in lossless FLAC and MP3 formats for easy
export; supports WAV, AAC, and AIFF files up to 96-kHz/24-bit resolution
• Free iPhone/iPad app for system control

• Coaxial digital audio output; Ethernet port; Meridian SpeakerLink and
Comms connections; Trigger and Remote IR minijack connections
• Dimensions + Weight: 18 x 13½ x 7¼ in; 23½ lb

The
original Sooloos music storage and server system was one of those
products that captured my attention right off the bat: It stopped me
dead in my tracks the first time I saw it in action. After viewing its
oversize touchscreen and noting all the great options for browsing
through a thousand or more stored albums, I knew I had to review it.

Spoiler: I loved it. (Read the review here.) The original Sooloos, which earned a Sound+Vision
Editors’ Choice Award, was a terrific product that offered a true
option for audiophiles looking to move beyond high-end CD transports. I
clearly wasn’t the only one who thought so: Shortly after my review
appeared, audiophile gear maker Meridian decided it liked Sooloos enough
to buy the company.

When a small company is purchased by a
larger, far more established entity, scary things can happen. Key people
are often pushed out, good ideas get lost, and what was once great
becomes mediocre. But in this case, the marriage could not have worked
out better. Meridian got to add a music server to its line, and Sooloos
benefited from Meridian’s audio wizardry.

The new Control 15, the
first combined Meridian Sooloos server, is a different animal from the
earlier Sooloos products. Whereas my previous system consisted of three
separate components, weighed close to 70 pounds, and cost $11,600, the
Control 15 is a single, 23½-pound unit that costs $7,500. The system
underwent a major software overhaul, and its audio “guts” are now
handled by Meridian. I wasn’t sure how Meridian could improve upon the
Sooloos experience, but I knew that I couldn’t wait to find out.

Setup

With the
system reduced to a single chassis, installation is embarrassingly
simple. This was literally a case where unpacking the component took far
longer than the actual installation — a process that merely requires
making an Ethernet connection to your home network and running a coaxial
digital audio cable to your A/V processor/preamp. Power is handled by a
large “brick”-type adapter, meaning that power-cord upgrades are out.

The
Control 15 provides two other connections that will be of great
significance to current Meridian gear owners. First is a DIN connection
labeled Meridian Comms that supports legacy Meridian components. Second
and more important is an RJ-45 connection labeled SpeakerLink that sends
balanced digital audio and control signals to the company’s powered
speakers. (Meridian describes the connection as being “more robust,
requiring less error correction, and producing lower jitter” than
standard digital audio hookups.) With SpeakerLink, someone interested in
assembling an incredibly simple, high-quality audio system need only
buy a Control 15 and a set of Meridian speakers.

I was a tad
disappointed to find no analog outputs on the Control 15 for a couple of
reasons. First, analog outs are perfect for connecting to a housewide
audio system, and when used with the company’s wonderful — and free! —
iPad app, you could enjoy the system all around the house. (Meridian
does offer a separate component called Ensemble that links to the
Control 15; it includes four analog outputs and a coaxial digital
connection plus an additional terabyte of storage.) Also, after noticing
a slight audio improvement in my system’s sound when I recently tested
Olive’s 4HD music server with its top-shelf digital-to-analog conversion
(read that review here), I was hoping to hear what Meridian could bring
to the analog front.

The system’s base has a slot-loading drive
that’s used for importing CDs, a process that takes about 8 minutes. Or
you can use the Control PC software (despite the name, it’s also
Mac-friendly) to import music across a network. This is a great option
if you have an existing library of ripped CDs, and it’s the only way to
import high-resolution FLAC fi les.

The Control 15 has some basic
configuration options such as volume leveling, crossfade times, skin
selection, file-format selection for exporting music, and Rhapsody and
RadioTime account setup. The Rhapsody integration, which I’ll discuss in
a moment, is such a stellar part of the experience that Meridian
Sooloos provides owners with a 6 month trial subscription to get well
and truly hooked.


Performance

Since
my last review appeared, the Sooloos interface has undergone some visual
changes — tweaks, if you will. Things have been moved around to make
navigation and searching more intuitive. New browsing options let you
sort files by audio quality (high-resolution, CD, lossy, and Rhapsody)
and organize according to frequently listened albums. Another
surprisingly beneficial sorting option is being able to exclude things
from a search. Say you want to focus on pop music but are going to go on
a head-shaving spree if you hear one more Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga
song. Or maybe you like country music but not traditional country or
bluegrass. With Exclude, none of those preferences will pose a problem.

Another
great new feature, Tagging, lets you select multiple albums at once,
and it also works wonderfully for setting up Export lists to transfer
songs to an iPod/iPhone. (Along with creating a lossless FLAC version of
your CDs, the Control 15 also creates an MP3 version for easy export.)
For example, your kids might like some artists that you want to get as
far away from as technology will allow. On the Control 15, you can
simply give stuff tags like “Horrible Tween Music” and easily avoid
them.

The system also helps to manage your music library through a
feature called Focus. This allows you to dial up what you’re interested
in hearing, such as a particular genre (Rock), or drill down to a
sub-genre (Arena Rock) or a certain decade (’70s). You can also focus on
a particular artist to, say, find every album on which Brian Eno is
credited. Or you can focus on a Mood, like Jazz music that’s tagged as
“Soothing” and “Sensual.” Another cool feature is Swimming, where the
system continually plays new music that fits your current Focus criteria
once the play queue runs out.

As I mentioned earlier, this
system’s Rhapsody integration is wonderful. (For those unfamiliar,
Rhapsody is a subscription service that gives you unlimited access to
stream more than 10 million songs for $9.99 per month.) You can build a
collection of thousands of albums you care about with very little
effort. Fancy one album by a particular artist? Why not get every album
that artist has recorded? Read an interesting album review? Audition
that album and then add it to your collection. (Fellow S+V reviewer
Brent Butterworth offered me Jazz recommendations for “Hey, what’s like
Kind of Blue?”) The Control 15 also applies tagging and metadata to
Rhapsody selections, which allows streamed Rhapsody content to become
part of Swim and Focus searches as if they were actually part of your
“owned” music collection.

 

In my review of the original Sooloos
system, I didn’t have any qualms with its audio quality. My exact
comments were, “Sonically, Sooloos was utterly beyond reproach,
producing audio that was both detailed and engaging. . . . It never felt
like I was listening to ‘data’ but rather enjoying music reproduced as
faithfully as my system would allow.”

Even so, Meridian has given
the audio portion of the system a Britney Spears-level makeover by
incorporating the same upsampling process and “apodizing filter” found
in its $20,000 808.3 Signature Reference CD player, which outputs audio
at 88.2 kHz. Ken Forsythe, Meridian’s director of technology, told me,
“If you compare the very best CD player, the Meridian 808, with the
sound quality from a Meridian Sooloos system, you won’t notice a
difference.”

While Redbook CDs do indeed sound wonderful on the
Control 15, the system truly shines when doing something that even
Meridian’s $20,000 CD player can only dream of: playing high-resolution
96-kHz/24-bit FLAC fi les. Music playback becomes more rich and
dimensional, with tighter, more refined bass and a lower noise floor. To
fill out my high-rez audio experience, David Chesky generously allowed
me to download several albums via HDtracks (the online store he founded
with his Chesky Records partner and brother, Norman), and listening to
each album was like rediscovering the joy of music anew. (A free
high-rez audio sampler can be downloaded from hdtracks.com.)

Female
vocals sounded especially impressive in 96/24, displaying increased
presence and texture. Rebecca Pidgeon’s Four Marys album is a very
sparse recording made inside a church. A cappella tracks like “The Cruel
Mither” show off a world of space around each lyric, letting you
experience every subtle vocal inflection. “Let’s Face the Music and
Dance,” the first track from Diana Krall’s When I Look in Your Eyes,
ends with tinkling chimes — and you can hear the individual tinkle of
each chime! Each piano note Krall plays has space and depth; you can
actually hear the notes decaying into the recording environment.
Furthermore, because these recordings have absolutely no noise or
distortion, you can listen at higher volumes for longer periods without
any ear strain or fatigue. Gotta love that.


Read more at https://www.soundandvision.com/content/review-meridian-sooloos-control-15-music-server-page-4#H1uJJD43pvQcRqdw.99
=============================================


Weinhart Design is always interested in purchasing quality
Audio, LP collections, specialists buying Audio Estates and interested
in most quality trades in's.

 We are here to make better sound and earn your trust & business.

All sales out of California are State Sales Tax exempt. 

California State Sales Tax of 9.5% applies for items picked up or shipped to a California address.

We accept
payments by Bank Wire Transfers without fees and is the only form of
payment on all sales out of the U.S. and Canada. We prefer this method
of payment and also makes shipping to addresses other than billing OK.

VISA, MC and Papal are gladly accepted within the U.S. and Canada as long as the charge is approved and were shipping to the BILLING ADDRESS and shipping to the billing address on record and adds a 3% fee to cover costs and DISCOVER & AMEX 4% to cover costs..

Please visit our "ALL NEW & Improved Web Site @ www.weinhartdesign.com

Call me directly in my Audio showroom in Los Angeles weekdays from 11-4PM @ 
310-472-8880
or on my cell including weekends from 10-10PM at 310-927-2260 and I can
answer your questions and help you with all of your new and pre owned
needs.





Making better Sound One 
      system at at a time, 


       



              David Weinhart

       Weinhart Design, Inc. 
          President & CEO 

 The Audio and Video Expert 
e: [email protected] 
   www.weinhartdesign.com

2337 Roscomare Road, Studio #1 
  Los Angeles, California 90077

   Showroom) 310-472-8880 
      Cell) 310-927-2260

No questions have been asked about this item.

Ask the seller a public question

You must log in to ask a question.

Return Policy

Return Window

Returns are not accepted on this item.