CES 2007

What's in a name? "It's a palindrome, sort of an anagram, and an ambigram," said Rob Darling. It's pronounced, "su loose," by the way.

"We all ripped our CDs to computer 8 years ago," Rob said. "That was easy—everything else about the experience was a nightmare. Who relates to lists? We decided we needed a graphic, touchscreen controlled interface that worked seamlessly with no user effort. That's what Sooloos is all about."

"Oh yes, we couldn't stand compression, so it had to work with FLAC—and if we weren't using compression, then sound quality mattered, so no fans and no moving discs within the audio portion of the system. We use flash there and house the noisy stuff elsewhere."

System price: $13,000.

The storage drives are available in 1TB and 2TB models called the Store:One and Store:Two (D'oh!). Other system attributes: super low-jitter design, DC coupled signal path, ground-free transformer-coupled digital output, 192kHz/24-bit converters, and servo-balanced analog outputs.

And yes, we were very excited to talk to folks who seem to "get" high-end music servers. We think that idea is going to change everything.