The Audio Guy

If you must go digital.

There is no question that the digital world has completely changed the face of music.

Us old school guys can still remember “back in the day” when setting up our stereos meant plugging the turntable wires into the receiver, hooking up two speakers, putting the album (that’s a large round black disc with grooves, kids) on the turntable and then sitting down with the album cover and liner notes and listening, really listening to the entire album while reading the liner notes as well.

There was an entire ritual that went on as we took the album out of the jacket, put a few drops of disc cleaner on the soft velvet brush and gently cleaned the platter before setting in on the turntable. It was a time when you spent time with music to listen to it without distractions.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of digital music and everything it’s done.

I can only imagine that the TSA folks wouldn’t appreciate the size of carry-on luggage necessary to haul all that stuff around and my iPod does fit nicely in to any carry-on bag.

And while there is much debate on whether downloading has helped or hurt the music industry, it has helped the consumer by making it extremely accessible to have music with you at all times.

That I love.

But I must admit, that even in my own life, I don’t take as much time to listen to or explore music like I used to.

By serious collector standards, I have a fairly small collection of cd’s (maybe 1,000 or so) and of those, I have probably forgotten at least half of them since I don’t have easy access to them (my wife won’t allow me to have “milk crates” full of cd’s on our living room floor!)

So how do you combine the best of both worlds?

We all know and love our portable music systems, but for the person that wants to re-live the “glory days” of audiophile sound, time spent enjoying music, and time spent exploring music, what’s a guy (or gal) to do?

The answer is a high quality digital music server.

I know there are several brands of music servers out there, but I am going to focus on my personal favorite, the Sooloos music server.

What’s so special about it?

Glad you asked.

First, any music server has to store all the digital information on their hard drive and in order to fit all that info on to the drive, they have to use some kind of compression (taking the digital information and making it smaller to fit on a hard drive) so you can fit more music on your server.

Without getting overly technical, compression comes in two flavors, lossy and lossless.

The first reduces the quality of the music and is fine for most people for portable music. The second, lossless, stores the music in “CD quality” format.

The Sooloos system (reviewed here by Stereophile magazine) stores the music in a lossless format for audiophile quality sound.

But what I find so enjoyable about the system is the interface. The system allows the user to create and experience much like the days of listening to an album.

The expected features, like album artwork, playlist capabilities, etc. are there but the extended features give you information like credits. So, let’s say you’re listening Miles Davis, Kind of Blue decide you really like the drummer. You look up the credits and discover that Jimmy Cobb is the drummer on the album. So, you click his name and discover that he was the drummer for Dinah Washington on her greatest hits cd, which you also own.

Here, not only do you get the benefit of liner notes, you get the benefit of a computer database that can cross reference your collection!

You can do that in the credits with most anyone involved in the album including musicians, producer, engineer, etc. Practically speaking, what it really does is to bring up a list of CDs you probably haven’t thought about in years.

When we had a demo system in our house, it took about 10 minutes before my wife and kids were lined up at the touch screen selecting music.

The system is so intuitive, I only had to explain a few basic features and they were off and running. Other features like swim and “mood” allow you to cruise your collection based on any number of parameters. And while the Sooloos falls just a bit short of the album experience (no full liner notes or lyrics are available as of yet) it does what I feel is more important.

It allows the listener to rediscover their music collection in an easy to use and well thought out format. Every review of the product I’ve read so far has lauded the designers at Sooloos for that. Even an album crate full of records can’t do that.  Check out my Soolos Page Here.

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