Kaleidescape’s movie player blows streaming, and your wallet, away

We’ve lost something in the past 15 years. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple; they’ve all convinced us that streaming is the best way to watch movies and shows at home. With everything at our fingertips, there’s no need to run to Blockbuster for the weekend’s entertainment, or wait for a DVD rental to arrive in the mail. And going to the movie theater is a luxury — one that keeps getting more expensive. But we were, all of us, deceived. We traded quality for convenience. And while TVs have improved drastically , we feed them inadequate, bitrate-starved, internet-throttled streams that won’t let our fancy screens show their full potential. Blu-ray sales have plummeted, and even though 4K Blu-ray sales went up slightly last year , they’re never returning to what they were. Throughout all of that, I’ve always known there was a better way. $2995 The Good High bitrate capability for visually lossless quality Atmos sounds clear and accurate Far superior to popular streaming apps The Bad Incredibly pricey Limited internal storage Only supports expensive in-ecosystem storage Kaleidescape gets movie files directly from the studios, encodes them at reference quality, and makes them available for download to its high-end media players and servers. They offer 4K Blu-ray quality, or better, without a disc, and the ease of streaming without the quality loss. But they’ve always been expensive — so expensive that even in my 20 years of reviewing AV systems I’ve never had the chance to use one. …