They called themselves Entotem and their new baby Plato. They’ve designed a completely self-sufficient player that serves not just the requirements of the latest digital tech but also legacy analogue kit such as a turntable or cassette deck, allowing LPs and tapes to be copied on the fly and archived as hi-res digital files. But the four friends reckon they can do better. It’s undeniably impressive, a sector populated with single-box solutions that can process and disseminate separate audio and visual digital media strands to multiple rooms with complete flexibility, usually via a control app. It’s 2013 and four music lovers from Derby with shared expertise in computer data storage have taken a long, hard look at the state of the media server art. The really clever thing? It could handle the past, too. I reckoned it had as much right as any to call itself the future. But the densely packaged machine that lurked inside a footprint no bigger than a 15in laptop took sonically acceptable multi-tasking to the next level, with capacity and flexibility to spare. There were teething glitches with its Android control app (now sorted) that drove me up the wall. Its sudden but inevitable departure hurt. I think the problem was that this early example of arguably the ultimate one-size-fits-all media server had settled itself so comfortably into my hi-fi world, it was only a matter of time before it slipped on a pair of fluffy slippers and started smoking a pipe. Although a tad Walter Mitty, the thought did mess with me come the time to give back the Entotem Plato last year ( HFC 400). Perhaps one of the biggest compliments I could pay an audio product on loan for test would be to tell whoever came to collect it they were most welcome to take it away but first they’d have to grapple it from my white-knuckled bear hug grip. The original Plato media server set the bar for do-it-all features, and here it’s back for more.
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March 2023
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