Professional Cd Player

Hands On: Kaleidescape Music Server and Disc Vault

The king of media servers continues to evolve.

Since the company’s introduction, the Kaleidescape line of hard-drive-bases media servers have taken the throne as the king of all movie devices. That kind of accolade , from both Kaleidescape owners and professional installers, is due to the system’s ease of use and performance, and also to the fact that the company has consistently stood nose-to-nose with the movie industry (which doesn’t particularly like what this device does) and not flinched.

Despite ongoing legal battles with Hollywood, the company continues to innovate new products. Wanting to demonstrate how easy its products are to set up and operate, Kaleidescape sent me its KSERVER-1500 1U rack server with 6TBs of storage, as well as its M500 player, modular Disc Vault, some support accessories, and pre-loaded Essential DVD and Best of Blu-ray collections.

Features

The rack server is a RAID-enabled unit capable of providing multiple terabytes (TB) of storage and network integration for metadata retrieval.

The M500 is the brains through its inclusion of components such as a Blu-ray drive, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio HD decoding, bitstream audio outputs and a user interface that can make Apple envious. The M500 facilitates home CD/DVD library content ripping and management.

The Disc Vault provides a means of storing and managing Blu-ray collections. It holds up to 100 discs, and dealers can utilize multiple Vaults as long as they are connected to the M-Class products.

As for software, Kaleidescape offers a growing selection of media packages that it can pre-load.

Setup

I ran an Ethernet cable to the demo unit’s router and I connected an HDMI cable from the M500 to a Key Digital video processor. I linked an optical cable to the M500, ran it to my Bryston pre/pro, connected the Vault to the M500 via USB and powered everything except for the Vault.

Per Kaleidescape’s instructions, I turned the components on so I could verify the latest version of its operating system. After seeing version 4.0.1, I rebooted it, which activated an automatic update, and with the download installed I plugged in the Vault and began to load Blu-ray discs.

I tried to access the dealer menus by typing in “my-kaleidescape” into my PC’s browser. With the link not working, I entered an internal IP address, which successfully brought me to the “installer” menu where I was able to select the proper audio output.

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