For many folks, your first question is: “What is a Kaleidescape?” That’s not exactly a surprise. For the most part, Kaleidescape products are sold primarily by medium and high end home solutions installers. This is not a product flying off the shelves of a Best Buy, nor something you can buy on Amazon or Temu. (Best Buy does sell it, in their stores and on their website.)
The Kaleidescape system consists first, of storage of, and a player of: Movies (and similar content – including TV series, music videos…). The first thing to know after that, is that its quality is unsurpassed, except for say, an IMAX movie theater. The audio is lossless and the video has far, far less data compression than even a 4K UHD Blu Ray movie. Never mind the generally mediocre to poor picture quality of streaming, even compared to 4K Blu Ray!
I’ve owned the entry level Kaleidescape for three plus years – the Strato S. It has enough storage for 150+ full length movies (4K UHD), and far more with lower quality content such as 1080p movies.
The much improved Strato C ($3995) plus a server, replaces my older (more expensive) Strato S. You use the Strato C in conjunction with any of the many Kaleidescape servers. The Strato C is far smaller, than my Strato S (which is a combined movie server and player), but, has roughly the same footprint when paired with a small server. There’s even a mount to hold the Strato C, and a small server – the Terra Prime 8TB (MSRP $4995). That 8 Terrabytes with a mix of 4K UHD and 1080p, should hold far more than 200 hundred movies…
This is not a real time solution like streaming. You go to their website (or order through the movie store on the player or mobile app), selecting a movie or several, and it will download. With my older setup it took typically an hour or two, so: “Hey let’s watch XYZ now” when you haven’t already downloaded it, is not happening. With today’s newer systems the download time is definitely less, and their current servers download four times faster than my Strato S. fast enough that you can say, “let’s download XYZ, then start to download while having dessert, then being able to watch it by the time the last plates are in the sink.
The even faster alternative – for $9,995 is the Terra Prime 8TB SSD. Now your wait from “download” to “watch” time is a handful of minutes if your internet speed is around 2 Gig… You will need a Strato C movie player as well as the server, of course.
For example, the faster alternative – for $9,995 is the Terra Prime 8TB SSD. Now your wait from “download” to “watch” time is in minutes…
For those wanting to build a massive collection of highest quality content, there are servers with 22TB all the way up to 88TB.
I started off with a statement about this being a personal server system. They can’t distribute content for commercial use.
At the minimum configuration, your Kaleidescape Strato C, with a server, is single Zone. The whole system is Ethernet Gig speed based. This is not a Wi-Fi product. You can use one Strato C for each room (zone) you want to play content. The larger servers can support many Strato C units.. For example, one fancy application: Let’s say, you love to entertain, and have a 9 bedroom home, and invite friends for the weekend. The smallest server (22/8) can support 5 Strato C units, so to have all your guests have access to different movies at once, you’d want the full size 88TB or 48TB HDD server, which supports 10 Strato C units. You can also opt for the Terra Prime SSD versions in 8 or 31TB which both support 25 separate feeds.
There is no higher quality form of content at this time, that you can have in your home, so a Kaleidescape solution is becoming pretty “standard” in higher end home theaters.
Now, “how really good is it?” Well, perhaps the proof is right here at CEDIA, where just about very demo room in the place, be it Sony, JVC, LG, HiSense… are using Kaleidescapes to serve up the content in their demo rooms and largest displays on the show floor – some over 200” diagonal, and still clean and sharp, thanks to the almost non-existent video compression, and lossless audio. Kaleidescape units are the defacto standard at CEDIA for displaying great content on large displays!
Budget allowing, it’s hard not to want to pair a Kaleidescape setup with your big OLED, or home theater projector, but of course, the picture and sound are great on smaller displays too.
Myself, “a poor editor” with my basic unit, and a limited budget, still have less than 100 movies downloaded (over 3 years) to mine. I primarily download the content with the best overall image quality – ie a lot of sci-fi, be it Passengers, or Star Wars, and of course on the fantasy side, Lord of the Rings… But I’ll also do a great action movie with great effects, as well, and some National Geographic National Parks content. I’m forgiving of picture quality when watching a sitcom series or a romantic comedy. Those I’ll stream, but if it’s going to look killer on my 77” LG OLED, or in my 106” projector-based home theater, then I’m adding it to my Kaleidescape movie collection. For movies I only expect to watch once, there is also a rental option on most of the catalog, typically $7.95.
Great stuff for those demanding the highest quality – movie theater quality, picture and sound, to be delivered to their audio and video systems. I’ve been a Kaleidescape fan since their first generation back around 2002 if I recall correctly (base price then $50K). Got to love tech – hardware prices depreciate while everything else gets more expensive. This is serious product for those serious about picture and audio quality.
