British electronics firm Meridian Audio Ltd. bought the New York-based media server company Sooloos today. Financial terms were not disclosed. The new brand will be called Meridian-Sooloos and will match the naming structure of Meridian-Faroudja, the company's highly respected video projector and video processor line. Sooloos gains an immediate distribution chain boost via Meridian's A-list installers and dealers worldwide, while Meridian gets a front-of-the-line pass to compete in the emerging world of home theater servers. Kalidescape on the high end and Apple on the low end frame the current marketplace for media servers, with all sorts of media center PCs in between. Kalidescape is currently dominant with the best installers and dealers, who sell media servers in the world of high-end AV where Meridian competes.

Sooloos' graphical user interface is amazingly slick, with iPhone-like touch-screen access to entire catalogues of music and movies. Using Sooloos' own remote or even a hardwired Crestron or AMX remote, consumers swoon over the way you can access your music. Sooloos even has ways to control Blu-ray, which most other media center PCs cannot do because of updates needed to Window's Vista operating system that are slated to come to market soon.

Meridian is known for making the first high-end compact disc player, as well as some of the best-sounding fully integrated audiophile and home theater systems. Adding Sooloos to their lineup of products gives an installation base of thousands of users a reason to upgrade their systems. While Meridian has sold thousands of their reference 800 disc players, each and every one of those clients is a strong candidate to add a Sooloos media server to his or her system for audiophile and videophile purposes.

Keywords: Sooloos, Sooloos sold to Meridian, Sooloos media server, Meridian, Bob Stuart, Walter Schofield, Peter Wellikoff, Tim Ireland