A Guide to Kaleidescape: The Movie Server for the Serious Home Cinema

The awkward thing about Kaleidescape is best said up front: you will be buying your films again. Not the box set on the shelf, but new copies, from Kaleidescape's own movie store, downloaded onto a server in your house. For anyone who has already paid for The Godfather twice, that is a hard sentence to read.

There is some consolation. Plug a qualified USB Blu-ray drive into a Strato player and you can register your DVDs and Blu-rays for Kaleidescape's disc-to-digital offers in the store. 4K Ultra HD discs can't be catalogued this way, and it is worth asking which of your titles qualify before counting on it.

What you get for buying again is the reason Kaleidescape exist at all.

Eight megabits against sixty-five

By Kaleidescape's own figures, the leading streaming services encode 4K video at an average of around 8 megabits per second. Kaleidescape's standard 4K films average 65. Because the films are downloaded to local storage before you watch them, that bitrate never drops when the broadband gets busy on a Sunday night. Nothing buffers, and nothing quietly falls back to a lower resolution halfway through the second act.

The soundtrack gets the same treatment. Kaleidescape's Strato players carry Dolby Atmos, Dolby TrueHD, DTS:X and DTS-HD Master Audio losslessly, bit for bit, at a higher bitrate than streaming services use.

Picture quality is where it shows on a big screen. Compression struggles most with darkness and haze, so pick a scene that is full of both: the orange fog of Las Vegas in Blade Runner 2049 is a good example. A low-bitrate stream tends to break those smooth gradients into visible bands and add a crawl of noise to the shadows. That is the scene to judge Kaleidescape by.

How the pieces fit together

A Kaleidescape system has two parts: a Strato movie player at each screen, and somewhere to keep the films.

The Strato K (£5,400) is Kaleidescape's newest player and their most ambitious. It introduces a format of their own, 4K Cinematic: selected films re-transcoded at an average of 110 megabits per second, with full chroma (up to 4:4:4) where a 4K disc or a stream carries less colour information. 4K Cinematic films play only on the Strato K. It is also the first movie player certified by the 8K Association, and plays native 8K in SDR and HDR10, though that only matters if there is an 8K display at the end of the cable. Below 8K it also supports Dolby Vision. On its own it stores about seven 4K Cinematic films, and downloads one in as little as 15 minutes over gigabit Ethernet.

The Strato V costs the same £5,400 and does without 4K Cinematic and 8K. It plays 4K in SDR, HDR10 and Dolby Vision, and has 960GB of solid-state storage built in. That is room for about ten 4K films, enough to run on its own in a single room. Downloads take as little as ten minutes over gigabit Ethernet, and a film becomes a candidate for automatic deletion 48 hours after you have watched it. You can download anything you have bought again at any time.

The Strato E (£3,595) is Kaleidescape's entry-level 4K player, in a smaller case, 163mm square. It plays SDR, HDR10 and Dolby Vision with lossless audio, and its 480GB drive holds about half a dozen high-bitrate films. It is small enough to take a handful of films to a second home and watch them there without an internet connection.

The Strato C (£4,495) is not a standalone player. It has no storage of its own, so it plays from a Terra server or from a Strato with internal storage, and it supports SDR and HDR10 but not Dolby Vision. What it adds is a separate HDMI audio output, which is useful when the processor and the display have to be fed separately.

Once a library outgrows what a player can hold, or a second room wants in, you add a Terra Prime server. Grouping a Strato with a server switches off the player's internal storage. In its place you get the full Kaleidescape interface, including the shuffling covers view and the parental controls. The smallest server is the Mini Terra Prime 8TB (£10,038): solid-state, cooled without a fan, and big enough for about 130 4K films. The larger solid-state Terra Prime 31TB (£29,800) holds roughly 500 4K films. It downloads one in as little as four minutes over 2.5 gigabit Ethernet and can serve 25 simultaneous playbacks. The hard-disk Terra Prime gives you more storage for the money, at £24,450 for 72TB and £31,400 for 96TB. A system can take up to four servers and any number of players.

Where it disappears into the room

Kaleidescape is designed to be controlled from somewhere else. Their control protocol is supported by Control4, Crestron, Savant and Josh.ai, and by Lutron RA3 and HomeWorks. Pressing play can dim the lights, close the blinds and set the screen masking to the shape of the film. The child remote is a nice touch. It brings up a covers-only screen with no text, showing just the films you have chosen for them, which saves a certain amount of negotiation on a wet afternoon.

Your films can be downloaded onto up to five systems registered to the same account, so a second home gets the same library. New Strato and Terra Prime products carry a five-year limited warranty.

Who should keep their money

If you watch on a television across the sitting room with a soundbar underneath, Kaleidescape is a lot of money for a difference you will struggle to see or hear. It makes sense when the rest of the room is already serious, with a JVC or Sony projector and a proper multichannel system behind it. In a room like that, the source is the weak link, and streaming leaves it weaker than it needs to be.

It is also worth knowing that the store's catalogue varies by territory, as Kaleidescape say themselves. If there are particular films you can't live without, check they are available in the UK before you commit.

Planning a system

Kaleidescape is usually best planned as part of the whole room rather than bought as a box, because the network and the control system both have a say in what works. You can browse everything we stock from Kaleidescape and the rest of our home cinema range online. To talk through a cinema room with Kaleidescape at its centre, get in touch.

Martins Hi-Fi
85-91 Ber Street, Norwich NR1 3EY
01603 627010
info@martinshifi.co.uk