Content warning: this unboxing blog post is going to sound like some Boomer B.S. right from the get-go, but I can’t help devolving into back-in-my-day reminiscence every time a new piece of Kaleidescape gear crosses my threshold. If you’re not familiar with the company, it makes movie servers and players—like the new Strato E (US$2995, CA$4495, £3399)—although what that means has changed quite a bit over the decades.
When I reviewed my first Kaleidescape system for Robb Report 20 years ago, it came in a 100-pound road case and comprised racks of interconnected equipment, including a big RAID array of hard drives (12 30GB HDDs, if memory serves correctly), a separate DVD ripper, and a media player to serve all of your ripped media to your home-theater system. At the time, of course, there was no such thing as buying movies over the internet.
Fast-forward a couple of decades, and pretty much all the functionality of that massive system now comes in a box that you can hold in the palm of your hand. Mind you, there’s not quite as much storage onboard the Strato E—just half a terabyte instead of 3.6TB—but there’s a reason for that. The Strato E isn’t designed to house your entire movie collection. It’s designed to keep maybe five full-bandwidth UHD movies and their bonus features ready to watch. The rest of your collection—purchased through the Kaleidescape Store—is there for the downloading any time you want. You just need to decide what movie you want access to anywhere between ten and 30 minutes ahead of showtime.
The 56mm 3×3 GAN Cube atop the box isn’t part of the system; it’s merely there for scale.
Crack the shipping container, and you’re not exactly met with a presentation that screams “luxury video server.” But it gets the job done, with nice foam padding that’s assembled in an interlocking style to give the whole thing more shock absorption.
You can already get a sense of just how tiny the Strato E is here. It’s even itty-bittier than the box would indicate. Honestly, Kaleidescape could just as easily ship this little buddy in a box a quarter of this volume.
OK, maybe more like half the volume. There are still accessories and instructions to include, and as you can see here, both are tucked nicely under the foam-padded Strato E. You might also be able to see here the preponderance of QR codes, all of which point to different, more in-depth documentation downloads.
Open the accessories box, and you’re met with some nice (and some pretty standard) pack-ins, including the expected power supply, but also a really nice HDMI cable and a Cat6A ethernet cable.
And, unsurprisingly, there are more QR codes, in this case pointing toward the Kaleidescape control apps for iOS or Android. That raises a point, though: those are the only control options most people will have for the Strato E. There’s no longer a physical remote. So unless you have an advanced control system (like my Control4 system) and the ability to program it or the budget for custom programming, the app is the way you’ll interact with this player.
Out of its padding, the Strato E is a striking little thing—and I do mean little. Again, a 56mm 3×3 GAN Cube is provided for scale.
But that’s not the most eye-catching thing about the design, in my not-so-humble opinion. The Kaleidescape logo, with its carefully arranged triangles, has also been cut into the metal of the casing—for ventilation, to be sure, but also to give the thing some flair. Mind you, most Strato Es will almost certainly be rack-mounted and hidden in a closet or some A/V furniture. Heck, I imagine a number of them will also be mounted to the back of televisions. But if you do, for whatever reason, decide to display it out in the open, it’s nice that it’s this fetching.
Here’s a closer look at the back panel. Not a lot of I/O to discuss: just an HDMI port, ethernet port, and USB port. And don’t go getting any ideas about the latter—it cannot be used to bring your own USB hard drive to the party to expand the storage space. Kaleidescape is not that sort of solution.
Speaking of storage space, a close-up look into the ventilation holes reveals the Strato E’s hard drive. It’s a half-terabyte NVMe SSD, specifically an M.2 2280 form factor by the looks of it. I can’t quite read the brand, but not that it matters. Replacing it isn’t an option. I asked Kaleidescape what would happen in the event that the drive failed, and I learned that the company would simply replace the customer’s entire Strato E, assuming it’s still under warranty.
This is going to be an interesting review for me. I’m used to Kaleidescape systems having oodles of storage (although seemingly never enough). To review one with enough storage for five UHD Blu-ray quality 4K movies at a time is going to require some mental adjustment on my part. But I think the biggest adaptation is going to be getting used to the more focused and streamlined UI of the Strato E.
We’ll see, though. Keep your eyes peeled for my full evaluation in the coming weeks.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
