Escient’s hi-def jukebox: for high-rollers only

Look away if you haven’t got at least three grand to drop, because Escient’s just shown us its seriously desirable ‘Vision’ home media server kit.

Starting small, there’s the modestly priced VS100 (pictured), which comes in at the aforementioned £3,000. For that you’ll get a DVD and CD player with a 500GB hard disk on board. Stump up another grand and you can go for the 1TB VS200.

Feeling extra wealthy? Then you can go for the behemoth 4TB VX600 server. That’ll pipe up to 600 full-quality DVDs or oodles of lossless music to either of the VS models, or up to ten of the ‘cut price’ VC-1 DVD/CD players dotted around your abode.

The beauty of it is that it’ll legally save entire DVDs to its hard drive – menus and all – rather than converting them to some other dubious format. It’ll upscale them to 1080p too, though it won’t yet take HD DVD or Blu-ray disks.

Everything hooks up by Gigabit Ethernet, so you’ll need to get the plasterers in and cable up – unless like us you’ve already specced Cat 5e for your entire penthouse.

Essentials

Escient Vision VC-1, VS100, VS200, VX600

Price: £1,500, £3,000, £4,000, £5,500

On sale: March

Contact: Escient

Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home