You may have seen a few sound servers before, maybe even a direct ancestor of this machine, but it's likely that the breed will be unfamiliar to at least a few folks reading this. The idea is simple enough: store the contents of anything from a few dozen to a few hundred CDs on a computer hard drive and regurgitate them on demand without the user needing to swap discs all the time. It's much cleverer than that, though, most obviously because this is actually four players fed from the same drive. Each can play completely separately from the others.
If you're the sort of person who considers listening to music to be an active rather than a passive activity, and who therefore has no interest in music being piped to the kitchen, the study, the bedroom or anywhere apart from the lone hi-fi system, you can buy a one-output S3000. The device works perfectly well as a simple jukebox, but its true home is definitely in a multiroom installation, where it makes the entire household's music collection instantly and effortlessly available to the entire household. Forget about the single-output machine, as there is, in fact, the choice of one, two or four outputs. You've got to love the flexibility: Alfie listens to Mozart in one room while Bertie listens to Radiohead in another, both off the same source. Caz, elsewhere, overhears Radiohead and decides to listen to the same track, starting from the top while Bertie is
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halfway through. Try doing that with a regular CD collection!
A hard drive is like a filing cabinet. You can put a lot of stuff in it, but unless you have a logical and efficient filing system, you may spend half your life looking for it. Imerge is fully aware of this and has put a lot of effort into making recordings traceable. In many ways it's considerably easier to find tracks on a sound server than in a CD collection.
In the S3000, Imerge has combined two technologies to make your music collection easily searchable: video and the internet. Video outputs at the unit's rear (composite, S-Video and VGA) provide a full graphical user interface via a TV or monitor (basic operation is possible using the front-panel display), while the built-in modem and Ethernet enable the unit to connect to the online Gracenote database. This means the player can automatically download not only track and album details, but even the album cover artwork, all from reading the CD's table of contents.
