GoKawiilWe’ve lost something in the past 15 years. Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple; they’ve all convinced us that streaming is the best way to watch movies and shows at home. With everything at our fingertips, there’s no need to run to Blockbuster for the weekend’s entertainment, or wait for a DVD rental to arrive in the mail. And going to the movie theater is a luxury — one that keeps getting more expensive.
But we were, all of us, deceived. We traded quality for convenience. And while TVs have improved drastically, we feed them inadequate, bitrate-starved, internet-throttled streams that won’t let our fancy screens show their full potential. Blu-ray sales have plummeted, and even though 4K Blu-ray sales went up slightly last year, they’re never returning to what they were. Throughout all of that, I’ve always known there was a better way.
Kaleidescape gets movie files directly from the studios, encodes them at reference quality, and makes them available for download to its high-end media players and servers. They offer 4K Blu-ray quality, or better, without a disc, and the ease of streaming without the quality loss. But they’ve always been expensive — so expensive that even in my 20 years of reviewing AV systems I’ve never had the chance to use one. They’ve been the purview of pricey, custom-installed home theater spaces. But now, Kaleidescape has released its most affordable 4K movie player yet. Although, at $2,995, the term affordable is extremely relative.
The Strato E isn’t a streaming device. It has a built-in 480GB solid-state drive, which is enough to store five to six 4K movies, plus a USB port and an HDMI 2.1 port that handles both audio and video output. What makes Kaleidescape unique is that it’s not constrained by bitrate in the same way as streaming or even Blu-ray can be. 4K UHD discs have a maximum bitrate of 144Mbps, although most discs are limited to 128Mbps. That maximum is most important for movies with lots of action and detail, like Top Gun: Maverick, although even Maverick won’t be at that maximum for the entire movie.
The average throughput for a title on 4K Blu-ray is around 50Mbps. The max throughput on most streaming services is significantly lower — usually around 20Mbps — with an average of under 10Mbps. Sony Pictures Core, which has a max bitrate of 80Mbps, is an exception, but it’s only available on Sony devices. Compression can add artifacts to the signal, which can visually show as color banding or a loss of detail, especially in dark scenes, and can limit the dynamic range and spatiality of the audio.
Kaleidescape gets its movies directly from the studios and does its own encoding pass, allowing it to determine what bitrate the movie requires for each frame to be visually lossless. Movies with lots of action, detail, and color — like Maverick, Incredibles 2, and Mad Max: Fury Road — can hit a higher maximum bitrate than Blu-ray, and way higher than most streaming services.
Title Average bitrate Maximum bitrate File size Top Gun: Maverick 71Mbps 166Mbps 84.6GB Incredibles 2 66.9Mbps 160Mbps 69.3GB Mad Max: Fury Road 68Mbps 152Mbps 69.6GB Godzilla vs. Kong 67.4Mbps 143Mbps 64.5GB Pacific Rim 70.7Mbps 137Mbps 78.1GB Ghostbusters (1984) 65Mbps 123Mbps 58.4GB
Against streaming, the Strato E was a big improvement in almost all situations. The spice-laden sand of Dune sparkled, and there was more devastatingly handsome detail in Oscar Isaac’s face than in the streamed version from HBO Max. When Paul first encounters Shai-Hulud in the darkness of the desert planet, the stream’s shadow detail gets crushed, and there can be banding artifacts from the compression. But because of the higher bitrate, the Kaleidescape doesn’t have those issues. Even though the scene is dark, the great worm is visible in the shadows. Compression artifacts inevitably pull me out of the story and the action, so when the image stays pristine, I’m able to stay immersed in the movie. It’s the great benefit of Kaleidescape: supporting the storytelling by faithfully presenting the material.
Fellow reviewer Dennis Burger noted in his review for SoundStage a drastic improvement in The Godfather Part II (a film he is very familiar with) over the stream from the Apple TV app, particularly in the natural grain structure. The extra bitrate likely helped the difficult task of causing the excessive film grain to look more organic. On the other hand, The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel found Ghostbusters to be noisier on Kaleidescape than the version he’s watched through Sony Pictures Core on his A95L.
For an audio comparison, I set up the new Bose Lifestyle Ultra system, which has good virtualized Atmos performance in my living room, but not as good as my discrete 5.1.2 SVS and Revel system with speakers on the ceiling. On the Bose, there’s still an audible difference between Kaleidescape and HBO Max, but the quality gap isn’t as wide as with my speakers.
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