By Andrew Liszewski
Any and all media filled plastic discs I’ve acquired over the years now sit in a couple of large binders, protected from the dust they’d inevitably collect on a shelf. It’s not that I don’t want to watch them, it’s just that the hassle of hooking up a DVD player to my TV again just isn’t worth the effort. And while ripping them to my PC is certainly an option, it’s just not as easy as Kaleidescape’s M700 appears to be. Sadly, that ease of use also comes with an almost $6,000 price tag.
You start with the M700 Disc Vault pictured above, which is capable of housing up to 320 CD, DVD or Blu-ray discs, which will probably be the source of some confusion given the numbers don’t match up. (Calling it the M320 makes more sense to me.) It will then automatically rip, or make a digital copy of the discs, at speeds of up to 15 CDs/hour, 3 DVDs/hour or 2 Blu-ray discs/hour. From what I can tell the M700 comes with its own on-board storage for the ripped copies, which can all be played with the discs removed, except for heavily protected Blu-rays which require the media to physically remain inside the vault. But if that’s not enough to house your entire disc collection, the company also sells a rackmount 1U Server which expand the M700’s storage capabilities to 150 Blu-ray discs, or 900 DVDs.
The M700 by itself comes with a price tag of $5,995, while the addition of the 1U Server brings the total cost up to around $16,000. And from what I can tell that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Kaleidescape’s complete offerings.
*Update: It turns out the M700 doesn’t include any storage of its own, but requires one of the Kaleidescape servers to store the digital copies of your media.
[ Kaleidescape M700 Disc Vault ] VIA [ SlashGear ]
