We've seen a few sound servers before, including a direct ancestor of this new machine, but it's likely that the breed will be unfamiliar to at least a few folks reading this. The idea is simple enough: store the contents of anything from a few dozen to a few hundred CDs on a computer hard drive and regurgitate them on demand without the user needing to swap discs all the time.

It's much cleverer than that, though, most obviously because this is actually four players fed from the same drive. Each can play completely separately from the others. If you're the sort of person who considers listening to music to be an active rather than a passive activity, and who therefore has no interest in music being piped to the kitchen, the study, the bedroom or anywhere apart from the lone hi-fi system, you can buy a one-output S3000.

The device works perfectly well as a simple jukebox, but its true home is definitely in a multiroom installation, where it makes the entire household's music collection instantly and effortlessly available to the entire household.

Forget about the single-output machine, as there is, in fact, the choice of one, two or four outputs. You've got to love the flexibility: Alfie listens to Mozart in one room while Bertie listens to Radiohead in another, both off the same source. Caz, elsewhere, overhears Radiohead and decides to listen to the same track, starting from the top while Bertie is halfway through. Try doing that with a regular CD collection!

A hard drive is like a filing cabinet. You can put a lot of stuff in it, but unless you have a logical and efficient filing system, you may spend half your life looking for it. Imerge is fully aware of this and has put a lot of effort into making recordings traceable. In many ways it's considerably easier to find tracks on a sound server than in a CD collection.

A CD library

In the S3000, Imerge has combined two technologies to make your music collection easily searchable: video and the internet. Video outputs at the unit's rear (composite, S-Video and VGA) provide a full graphical user interface via a TV or monitor (basic operation is possible using the front-panel display), while the built-in modem and Ethernet enable the unit to connect to the online Gracenote database.

This means the player can automatically download not only track and album details, but even the album cover artwork, all from reading the CD's table of contents.

Once the details have been stored on the S3000's internal drive, they can be used for searching by title or artist. You can also assemble playlists matching all sorts of criteria. If you've ever used a PC as a music source you'll have a pretty good idea, but this is even better, because the whole system (which is actually based on an embedded PC internally) is geared to that one function. We fell in love with it at once, though even after a generous review period we'd probably only investigated half the possibilities.

Two basic questions have probably already crossed your mind. One, how does the music get round the house; and two, how does it get on the hard drive in the first place?

The first of these is easily answered: via regular stereo interconnects, preferably connected to a multiroom distribution amplifier, perhaps with CAT5 signal cables concealed within your walls and under the floors, and therefore installed by a professional.

Or, theoretically, you could just use very long interconnect cables. Yes, whatever scheme you use, it's going to cost a bit and cause some mayhem, unless you're having a pretty thorough domestic overhaul done at the time (a lot of new-build properties have all sorts of wiring pre-installed).

There's a single digital output, which could in principle be relayed by a wireless link... and there's nothing to stop you using a Sonneteer Bard system to replace the wiring of one output, but that adds considerably to the cost as well.

As for question two, there are various ways to get audio onto the hard drive. The most obvious is to use the CD-ROM drive built into the S3000. Put a disc in and, a small number of button pushes later, the contents can be copied at high speed - a full CD takes only just over two minutes.

You can also connect to a PC via Ethernet (and indeed control the S3000 from the same PC if you wish) and transfer music that way, which opens up the world of downloadable audio and allows you to transfer to and from portable players.