With the advent of ample storage space on hard drives, it seemed only logical that music lovers and audiophiles would be thrilled to bits, except of course for the unfortunate reality of bit-compression rates. It is pointless to invest in excellent sound delivery systems and other peripherals when the source music is in sub-par MP3 format.

Take the much praised Sooloos Music Server, a product conceived and built by three friends with giant music libraries and overlapping talents. They wanted a no-compromise solution and the Sooloos is the product they came up with. Aside from the storage capacity measured in terabytes (1TB will hold up to 3,000 CDs of music), the Sooloos fuses an incredible interface with FLAC (Free Audio Lossless Codec), which is a compression algorithm that provides bit-for-bit accuracy to the source. The terabyte storage capacity (there are three standards: 1, 2 or 3 terabytes) provides plenty of space for FLAC-produced files.

The Sooloos is a sleek piece of work, from its 17-inch touch-screen display to the stand-CD drive. You will have to close your eyes and imagine this: your entire music collection displayed as album art (18 to one display). Simply touch one to listen to it. If you're feeling adventurous, simply select a genre and, with a few taps of your finger, you’ll be able to experience your entire jazz selection – or just the albums from the 1960s, just those with John Coltrane, or even those with just Coltrane as a part of Earl Bostic’s band. This is possible thanks to the support of AMG (the All Media Guide), making this an Internet-dependent system.

For just the core system of a Control (the 17-inch display), Source (the processor, digital-to-analog converters and analog output stage) and the Store (twin hard drives – one primary drive and one mirror-image backup), the stated price is US$12,900.