It’s the time of year for saving money!
On Wednesday July 13th Sooloos announced a software update. And unlike my recent experience with Apple’s OS 10.6.8 update the Sooloos update went smoothly.
On Friday I noticed a message was waiting for me in the Sooloos message box. It told me I had an upgrade waiting. To perform the update all I had to do was select “update” at the bottom of the message. Ten minutes later the update was complete and my Sooloos Control 15 was endowed with the ability to store and play176.4 and 192 sample-rate music files. When I opened “Control Mac” Sooloos software for importing and exporting files I was greeted with a message that my Control Mac program was no longer compatible with my Control 15 software. But after a nano-second it began downloading the latest version. After another minute I was ready to transfer a few of my high-rez music files to the Sooloos.
I ported over a couple of my MA recordings‘ high-def 176.4 files and after a fifteen minutes (these are BIG files) my system was ready to regale me with some of Todd Garfinkle’s lovely-sounding recordings. One thing I noticed during the transfer -the Sooloos system took ALL the bandwith on my Wi-fi network. My iPod Touch couldn’t even connect while the transfer was happening.
How did the files sound sound? Wonderful, of course. But there’s one slight hiccup – high definition files that are above a 96/24 sample rate are down-sampled by the Control 15 to either 96/24 or 88/24. All the MA recordings were played back at 88/24 instead of 176.4. I guess I’ll have to wait for the next generation of Sooloos hardware/software to play these higher bit-rates at their native rate.
So does the Meridian playing a file at 88/24 beat an Oppo playing the file at its actual native rate of 176.4?
I’ll let you know in a couple of days…
