For picky geeks like me, the digital revolution has not been entirely without its frustrations. Yes, I am wireless, online, mobile, synched, and fully connected. I chat for free from Mt. Kilimanjaro, and spend as much time on Gmail as I do in my apartment. My "record collection" — 350 gigabytes of lossless data parked on a server in my bedroom — can bend easily to my most whimsical desires, as long as they conform to the technical abilities of iTunes. Surely anyone can appreciate the thrill of putting together a playlist containing only songs with the word moon in the title. How else could you match Billie Holiday's version of "I Wished on the Moon'' with Rick James's "Moonchild'' and Gidon Kremer's hypnotic rendition of the Romanian composer George Enescu's "Moonlight Through the Windows"?

And yet... Perhaps I'm of the Henry Higgins variety — you know, a man who desires "nothing more than an ordinary chance to live exactly as he likes and do precisely what he wants'' — but, despite the convenience of iTunes, there is something fundamental missing from the experience. I want to stare at album art, study reviews, check out antecedents, and see what else the musicians who perform on my albums have done. I want to listen to cover versions. And I want my machine to organize all of that for me. Is that asking too much? If Google can deliver 32,000 pictures of Laetitia Casta to my MacBook Pro in less than one second, surely there is a music server that can provide a couple of reviews, some sonic wonder, and a sense of beauty.

Finally, a company has done just that: Sooloos. This music system is not for everyone, though. At $13,000, it costs more than a Smart car. Nor is it quite as wirelessly flexible as one would like. (The exquisite monitor needs to be wired directly to your Ethernet network.) But these are quibbles; no musical server has come nearly as close to combining aural splendor and technical sophistication in a package that is as much fun as a video game. Sooloos is a system more than a product: It comes with two sleek silver boxes, which include a two-terabyte server that automatically backs itself up every night. That's enough space to convert more than 2,000 CDs into bytes and bits with the highest possible audio fidelity. (It's a simple process, but buy the system and Sooloos will throw in the digital conversion for free. All of your music will be categorized, cross-referenced, and easy to understand.)

The Sooloos runs silently — there are no moving parts, and the sound is as rich and nuanced as any audiophile system that costs five times as much. (You will, though, need to supply the speakers and the amplifier.) Its true greatness resides in its intensely friendly, completely intuitive interface. The music is controlled from a 17-inch touch screen that looks like an aluminum iMac and runs like a Bentley. You can search your collection by album, date, musician, or any other combination. Click on the cover art for The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and suddenly all your David Bowie albums appear in order and in color. Want to know which day the record was released? It's listed on the left. Touch a bar called "Read Album Review" to get a contemporary appraisal. But that's just kid stuff. Sooloos doesn't just store your songs; it delivers them with stunning imagination. You can make conventional playlists, of course. Or you can focus. "Focus" allows you to categorize your music by genre, label, and even contributors. Want to find all the music in your collection produced by Nick Lowe or recorded on Deutsche Grammophon? It takes less than a second. There is even something called "swim mode," which shuffles all your music randomly. But this is shuffle 2.0: You can single out particular songs, albums, operas, or any other category you might devise to play in any order you choose. When the selections are finished, the Sooloos will continue "swimming" through your collection to music that is similar.