Elite Beyond Recognition: Kaleidescape M700 Disc Vault

You don’t need it, and damn sure can’t afford it. While you gaze upon the showcase here, you can hear your checkbook crying wherever it is — that’s for sure. We don’t care. We’re just waving flashy stuff around that we can’t afford either. Welcome to your tour of the unnecessary and elite.

If you’re rich and you have a massive disc-based media collection, Kaleidescape has a product for you. There are plenty of disc archiving devices out there, but this one is  one of the most expensive at $6,000. It supports just about any disc format you can imagine: DVDs, CDs, DVD-Audio discs and even Blu-ray discs (which Born Rich amusingly refers to as “blue-ray disks”).

Basically, the device allows you to take all of your discs and copy them to an internal hard drive (which is why the device is so big). After you copy all of the discs’ content to the device, you can watch them without having to reinsert the disc. According to the product page for the Disc Vault, it allows you to copy up to 320 discs but it does not say what kind of discs those are. If that isn’t enough space for your collection, you can easily add more space by connecting two Disc Vaults to the same home network. It doesn’t matter which device the disc was copied to, it is available to all of the Disc Vaults on the network. Sadly, the only way to connect it to your home network is via an ethernet cable, which is a shame, since you’d think a $6,000 device should at least have built in Wi-Fi.

The Disc Vault has a small LCD screen on its front face that displays the number of discs you’ve copied and how much space is left, and its slick interface that allows you to easily navigate your library. It presents you with a “wall” of disc covers that are automatically pulled from the internet.

If you have an extremely high-end entertainment system, the Disc Vault could be a nice addition.