NEWS: Escient gives you total control of your music and movies collection

If you want just one device to store, play and stream all your digital music and movies, US company Escient may have the solution.

It's adding to its range of digital music servers with the new Vision Series, designed to store all your CDs and DVDs on a single hard drive.

The flagship VX-600 (£5499) has a whopping four Terabytes of storage capacity – equivalent to 50 MacBook Airs – so there should be plenty of room for even the biggest of disc collections.

The Escient system can import complete DVDs, including menus and extras, but you can strip out DVD trailers and other irritating pre-film features if you so desire. Once loaded on the hard drive, users can search the video library using the cover art – a bit like iTunes Cover Flow – and create bespoke movie playlists.

You can also browse films by title, genre, actor, director and rating.

The VS100 and VS200 players and the VC-1 zone player can spin CDs and DVDs, and the latter can be upscaled to 1080p via the HDMI 1.3a output.

If you want the system to deliver multiroom entertainment, up to ten VC-1 players can be run off a single VX server, and up to four VX units can be linked together to provide storage of around 2400 films.

The system can be configured to allow you, say, to watch a film on your HD projector in the front room, listen to music in the bedroom and watch a slideshow of your family photos on the flatscreen TV in the kitchen.

And of course no such system would be complete without an optional iPod dock, in this case the Escient FP-1.

The complete Vision range will be available from Easter. Prices are:

  • VS100 £2999
  • VS200 £3999
  • VC-1 £1499
  • VX600 £5499
Andy Clough

Andy is Global Brand Director of What Hi-Fi? and has been a technology journalist for 30 years. During that time he has covered everything from VHS and Betamax, MiniDisc and DCC to CDi, Laserdisc and 3D TV, and any number of other formats that have come and gone. He loves nothing better than a good old format war. Andy edited several hi-fi and home cinema magazines before relaunching whathifi.com in 2008 and helping turn it into the global success it is today. When not listening to music or watching TV, he spends far too much of his time reading about cars he can't afford to buy.