The A/V Strato-sphere

from any room throughout your home. Which direction you go will be a matter of need—and also budget—as all of the Strato players offer an identical Kaleidescape experience—the focus of this review.

DIGITAL DELIGHTS

Kaleidescape started out as a solution to manage a large disc collection via an assortment of playback and storage products— one with an advanced interface that made access and playback as simple as possible. But the company’s solution also came with a rather high price tag. Price remains a consideration as the products still exceed the budget of many, but the Kaleidescape experience has also advanced to a new level that helps justify the steep price points.

The current line of products load content exclusively from Kaleidescape’s online movie store where you’ll find a massive catalog of films, TV shows, documentaries, concerts and more to purchase and download. Titles are available in video formats ranging from standard-definition 480P all the way up to full 4K with HDR for movies. Kaleidescape supports HDR10 high dynamic range, but not Dolby Vision or HDR10+. During my review, I didn’t see any TV shows being delivered in 4K/HDR, but that’s something I expect to see in the future as more shows are delivered in that format on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon.

Kaleidescape’s offerings might sound the same as what you get from services like itunes, Amazon, and countless others, but Kaleidescape is the only digital platform that delivers movies with the same A/ V quality as their disc counterparts. Kaleidescape is not a streaming service— purchased titles are downloaded directly to your Strato S or Terra Server and then accessed by the player. The last time Sound & Vision reviewed a Kaleidescape system, its online movie store could only be accessed from an internet browser on a computer. Now, the store can be accessed directly from the player, a computer, or the Kaleidescape mobile app, along with full access to your account info, movie lists, and more. This makes it easy to add titles to your collection at any time. Hanging out at a friend’s house and hear about a movie that you’d like to check out? Launch the app on your phone, add the title to your collection, and it will download to your system and be ready to view before you return home.

The Kaleidescape movie store is the main reason why I decided to invest in my own Strato S during the course of this review. I’ve always been a film lover and have amassed a huge library of shiny discs over the years. But I’m finding that studios are slowly moving away from pre-recorded formats. I am always looking for the best A/V experience possible and for that reason prefer viewing movies in 4K/HDR. And while there’s a sizable list of titles on Ultra HD Blu-ray disc, many new releases I want to own are only being

of pre-recorded discs. The advantage to Kaleidescape is that it offers a large range of titles that are only being offered for digital delivery in 4K/HDR— the last time I checked, there were almost 400 4K/HDR titles available in the Kaleidescape movie store that are not available on disc. I love big popcorn movies as much as the next guy, but there are many films other than blockbusters that I want to own and experience in the best quality possible, and Kaleidescape delivers just that. I can only imagine that Kaleidescape’s advantage will grow as studios lean increasingly on digital delivery.

THE EXPERIENCE

Okay, we’ve established that Kaleidescape has key advantages when it comes to content selection, but what the company has built its reputation on is the Kaleidescape experience, and that starts with the glorious cover art interface. This displays your library of downloaded titles as a wall of cover art that can be arranged in various ways, including alphabetically or as a moving, evolving interface that shuffles as you highlight individual titles. Covers can be shuffled to show similar titles based on genre and more. And for those that don’t like this method, you can instead select a list interface that can be sorted through a multitude of options including format, director, and actor.

Once you choose a movie to watch, you can instantly navigate to any chapter from it, or even select from pre-chosen favorite demo scenes—a great feature for those of us who love to demonstrate the A/V prowess of our home theater. You even get the ability to make your own favorite demo scenes or create what Kaleidescape calls “scripts” that interweave trailers, scenes, and more.

While the Kaleidescape interface is its signature feature, the system delivers much more than that. The players are networked and designed to interact with various control systems in order to deliver a fully customized experience, including cues for lighting and projection screen masking systems. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to try out all of these features since I don’t use a control system in my home theater, but I’ve seen them demonstrated firsthand in other systems and it’s a fantastic enhancement.

The Strato players offer many well-considered features in their setup menus including the option to elevate subtitles in the main image for use with “scope” projection screens, default to a specific soundtrack language, and even perform the required scaling and stretching for projection systems with an anamorphic lens. Overall, I found myself very impressed with the level of thought and detail that went into the development of the playback system.

One thing I was initially concerned with was how long it would take to download a movie to the Strato S for playback— probably the only hitch in Kaleidescape’s delivery service. Download times largely depend on the speed of your internet connection, and you also may have to take into account data caps depending on how many

titles you plan to download. My internet service is on the faster side, and I found that Hd-quality movies would download in about 30 minutes and 4K/HDR movies in about an hour or less. So, not exactly instant access, but easy to plan for if you want to watch something later in the day or evening. Pre-orders for movies that haven’t yet been released, meanwhile, get put in a queue and are downloaded as soon as they become available.

I quickly found that I didn’t need to keep a local copy of all my titles on the Strato S player, which helped to preserve space. (A Strato S with 12 TB of internal storage holds up to 180 4K movies, 320 Blu-ray-quality movies, or 1,800 Dvd-quality movies.) Since any movies that I owned could be downloaded from my account, I only needed

to keep the titles I wanted instant access to, or knew that I would be watching in the coming days, stored locally.

The only downside here is that the Kaleidescape interface doesn’t display all the titles in your library, only the ones downloaded to the player. I’ve love to see the company add the ability to show everything in your library, including titles that aren’t residing on a player or server’s internal storage. I’d also love to see a pre-buffer option, so you could immediately start watching as titles download.

BUMPS IN THE ROAD

I’m going to sound off here on a few more things I’d love to see Kaleidescape add to its movie store and overall experience. The most obvious one is

broader support for immersive audio. Kaleidescape supports both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, with plenty of movies available in both formats. But there are titles lacking Dolby Atmos or DTS:X when the same movie can be found on disc or on other digital services with immersive audio. The specific movies I’m referring to are mostly from Universal and 20th Century Fox, although more Universal titles with Atmos were added during my review and I’ve heard that more are coming from Fox.

I was also surprised to find that many concerts in the movie store lack higher-resolution soundtracks. For example, quite a few concert Blu-rays I have in my collection feature 24-bit/96khz multichannel mixes, while the same versions on Kaleidescape were standard lossless Dolby Truehd or DTS-HD Master Audio. I was also surprised to find no Dolby Atmos music offerings

similar to what’s available on the Tidal streaming service.

[Editor's note: According to Kaleidescape, its service offers a handful of concerts with Dolby Atmos, and you can find them by browsing collections with the Dolby Atmos filter set. —A.G] Even adding albums that were previously only offered on Dvd-audio or SACD seems like something Kaleidescape could pursue to create new options for the audiophile community.

Kaleidescape’s pricing is also worth noting. While sales were frequently offered during my review period, the company’s standard pricing can be pretty hit or miss. This seems to be studio-dictated, with some prices (Warner Brothers and Paramount, for instance) bordering on offensive compared with the same movies on other digital delivery services or even disc formats. Prices for offerings from other studios were comparable to their disc counterparts, and sometimes a bit lower.

My only other beef involves the lack of some form of digital copy. Kaleidescape used to be compatible with Ultraviolet, but that feature disappeared when UV closed up shop in 2019. I’d love to see support for Movies Anywhere, so you could access content you’ve purchased through Kaleidescape’s movie store on portable devices—a great feature for kids with ipads during travel. Buying a large digital library and then having access limited to devices in your home seems like a serious limitation, especially when Movies Anywhere has wide support from other digital services.

CONCLUSION

I was thoroughly impressed with Kaleidescape from the moment I first encountered the company’s products, but also viewed it as an expensive solution that didn’t make sense for my needs. But now that I’ve experienced Kaleidescape in my own home theater, I liked the Strato S player so much that I bought my review unit. While I adore the Kaleidescape interface, having access to uncompromised A/V presentation of movies is ultimately what sealed the deal for me. I hope the company continues to grow its library and smooth out the bumps described above. That said, Kaleidescape offers a superior digital movie delivery experience. Like Ferris Bueller once said (about a Ferrari), “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up!”

that’s said to control high frequency dispersion while better matching the tweeter’s dispersion to that of the midrange driver at the crossover point. (All crossovers in the Performabe speakers are fourth-order acoustical.)

There are two subwoofers in the Performa line offering either a 10-inch or a 12-inch driver. Revel sent us a pair of the smaller, 10-inch B110V2S. Both models are compact and provide 1,000W (RMS) amplification, rugged drivers said to have 82 percent more linear excursion than their V1 predecessors, and massive (19.2 lb.) magnet structures. There’s a single parametric equalizer onboard, and also an Extended mode offering a slightly greater extension in the deepest bass. (In my room I found the bass to be not quite as clean under stress in Extended mode, so I left it off.) All rear panel controls are manual only— there is no wireless setup accessible via an app. Revel’s Low Frequency Optimization, a feature in the V1 versions that required a computer for set-up, is not included in the V2 subs.

The angled sides and rounded backs of the Performabe speakers, together with their internal bracing, are said to significantly increase cabinet rigidity, something to which I could vouch for via the highly technical knuckle-rap test. All models offer pairs of input terminals for either bi-wire or bi-amp use. The subwoofers are available in piano black, gloss white, or gloss walnut finishes, while the tower, bookshelf, and center channel speakers add a metallic silver option.

SETUP

I positioned the F226BE towers 9 feet apart, with the C426BE center between

them on a low stand beneath my projection screen. The front speakers sat roughly 4 feet out from the wall behind them and were angled toward the center listening seat. One of the B110V2 subwoofers was located in the front of the room, the other in the back as described in Subwoofer Setup Steps from the April/may 2020 Sound & Vision (also available at soundandvision.com), a how-to feature that details the layout of my 10,000 cubic feet-plus open-concept room. Revel also sent a pair of M126BE bookshelf speakers to use as surrounds and these were positioned at the sides of the room just behind and slightly above the listening position.

The system driving the Revels included a Marantz AV8805 preamp-processor, three channels of a five-channel Parasound Halo A 52+ amplifier for the fronts, and two channels of a five-channel Outlaw 750 amplifier for the two surrounds. Disc players used were an

Oppo UDP-203 for movies and Marantz UD7007 for music.

MUSIC PERFORMANCE

All music listening was done in stereo, starting with the F226BE towers alone without subwoofers. Most speakers I’ve used in my very large room without subwoofer support have sounded bass-light. But with these Revels sans subs, large Kodo drums sounded tight and hard-hitting, with no bloat or boom. While this was impressive at first, it soon became obvious that the bottom two octaves or so were largely missing. The bass on Bela Fleck’s Flight of the Cosmic Hippo was clean, but it lacked the growl that makes the track effective. And while there was enough going on in a good organ recording to be relatively satisfying, the weight in the low octaves that makes the organ unique among instruments just wasn’t there.

Small rooms, and many mid-sized ones, add so-called room gain in the low frequencies, and a speaker designer must assume a certain room gain when they engineer their speakers. But a very large room can throw these assumptions off (just as a large speaker, designed for use in a large room with little room gain, can be bass-heavy and bloated in a smaller one). I have no doubt that the F226bes, used alone in a smaller, enclosed room, will produce a richer, more balanced low end. But in a large room or open-concept space such as mine, they need a good subwoofer— or two—to truly sing. Fortunately, a good home theater setup will invariably include this.

With the pair of Revel B110V2 subwoofers fired up and crossed over to the F226BE towers at 90 Hz, the sound was transformed. Percussion remained tight and crisp, but now also had power and depth as the drum strokes energized the room and reverberated into it. The Bela Fleck cut sounded more substantial, and organ nearly rattled the space. Although no subwoofer I’ve yet used can flap pant legs in my large, open concept space, the two B110V2S, each with a modest 10-inch driver in a small cabinet, proved surprisingly potent.

Many speakers exhibit excessive bloom in my room due to a peak between 100Hz and 200Hz at the most practical listening positions. That’s too high in frequency for the parametric EQ in the Revel subwoofers, or in any others, to cure. (My measurements confirmed that this peaking was a room effect and not an issue with the Revel speakers.) While many listeners prefer hearing