Meridian sooloos, Olive 6HD, ??


Confused with choices. What music server to buy? Budget $2500-$4000 new or used. Looked at Olive and Meridian. The exterior of the Olive 6HD disc slot has the aesthetics (puke green) of a Fischer Price toy (what were they thinking?). I want a screen and disc drive to copy my large CD collection to build-in hard drive and ability to add backup hard drive. Plan to use iPad Mini for control. Keeping my SACD player for my large SACD collection but ideally would like to copy my SACD's to disc and put SACD's in storage with my CD collection but not possible with current SACD copyright restrictions.
airegin
You owe it to yourself to check out the Music Vault servers made by Neal van Berg. I have the Music Vault Emerald and have been thrilled with it for years. I don't doubt that the Olive and Sooloos are good products, but they do not come with the unrivaled personal support that Neal provides.
Kedoades, the best systems split the audio streamer endpoint part from the noisy "server" part.

Now several manufacturers try to shoehorn this all into one box (server/streamer/storage/DAC) but this will be less versatile and less flexible.

This is why I like the Meridian Streaming System because you can invest and adapt your system as you grow. Need more storage, then add storage. Need a reference media source to your main listening room or just a casual audio endpoint to dining hall or gym, then add just that. No reason to buy full servers everywhere and manage them separately, just add the corresponding function for the job and manage them as a seamless Meridian audiostreaming system.
I've been quite pleased with my LaCie 5Big NAS and Oppo BDP-103. With 5 removable drive bays, up to 15T storage, twonky, 2 LAN's for faster downloads, remote access, etc. the LaCie is a very capable NAS. Twonky Beam or Bubble UPnP allows use of android or iOS devices as a media controller and the Oppo makes a first class media renderer that can playback virtually any audio or video source. A LaCie 2big NAS with two 3T hard drives and Oppo BDP-103 can probably be had for less than $1000. Use the android or i-device that you already own as a media controller and viola', you have a very capable UPnP network solution to manage your media.