Televisions have become substantially larger over the past decade, but the audio systems sitting beneath them have not always kept pace.

Mount an 85-inch television on the wall and place a compact soundbar underneath it and the mismatch can be rather obvious. There are certainly active soundbars capable of producing impressive output, but buyers who want a genuine left, center and right front soundstage usually have to choose between three conventional loudspeakers, architectural speakers hidden in the wall, or a premium passive soundbar.

MartinLogan thinks there is another way.

The new Motion Discrete Cinema Series consists of six passive loudspeakers designed specifically around 65, 75 and 85-inch class televisions. Three are individual LCR speakers that can be installed vertically or horizontally, while three combine discrete left, center and right channels inside a single enclosure.

More interestingly, MartinLogan has not simply made the cabinets longer as the screen size increases. The company increases the number of drivers as well, with the goal of increasing output capability and acoustic scale along with the size of the display.

That makes this considerably more interesting than another skinny speaker designed primarily to disappear beneath a television.

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Two Ways to Build the Front Soundstage

The Motion Discrete Cinema lineup is divided into LCR5, LCR7 and LCR9 loudspeakers, plus Soundbar 65, Soundbar 75 and Soundbar 85 three-channel passive soundbars.

All six models use MartinLogan’s Gen2 Folded Motion Tweeter with Folded Motion Waveguide, woven fiberglass woofers and extruded aluminum enclosures.

The LCR5 is designed as a height match for 65-inch class displays and uses a five-driver array consisting of the Gen2 Folded Motion Tweeter and four 4.5-inch woven fiberglass woofers.

The LCR7, intended for 75-inch displays, adds two additional woofers for greater output, higher power handling and improved room control in larger spaces. The flagship LCR9 moves to a nine-driver configuration designed to provide greater output and scale alongside an 85-inch display.

All three can function as left, center or right speakers, which means an installer could place three vertically around a display, rotate one horizontally beneath the television for center-channel duty, or use them as high-output surrounds where their shallow profile makes sense.

The Soundbar models take a different approach.

These are not powered soundbars competing directly with products like the Sonos Arc Ultra. There is no built-in AVR replacement here. The Soundbar 65, 75 and 85 contain discrete left, center and right loudspeaker channels and require external amplification.

That means an AV receiver or separates still handle decoding, amplification, bass management and the rest of the home theater system. The advantage is that buyers get three physical front channels inside one enclosure without surrounding a large television with three conventional speaker cabinets.

The Soundbar 65 is designed for 65-inch class displays and uses a Gen2 Folded Motion Tweeter and two woofers per channel. The Soundbar 75 increases the driver count, including twice as many woofers in the center channel and additional drivers for the left and right channels.

At the top of the range, the Soundbar 85 uses a 15-driver array across its three discrete channels.

What Makes Motion Discrete Cinema Different?

Screen matching is the clever part.

Plenty of manufacturers produce passive soundbars and slim on-wall loudspeakers. MartinLogan’s approach is to create three progressively larger configurations and increase their acoustic capability rather than offer essentially the same speaker in different cabinet lengths.

That becomes especially relevant with today’s 75 and 85-inch televisions, where a small center channel or narrow soundbar can look disproportionately small and may struggle to create the sense of scale expected from a large image.

There is also some real loudspeaker technology inside these enclosures.

MartinLogan has managed to incorporate its full-size Gen2 Folded Motion Tweeter and an application-optimized Folded Motion Waveguide rather than developing a miniature tweeter specifically to squeeze into the cabinet. The woofer system was intentionally optimized around midrange and upper-bass performance, with MartinLogan assuming that a serious home theater installation will include at least one powered subwoofer.

That last point is worth remembering. These are not being positioned as full-range loudspeakers that somehow violate several inconvenient laws of physics simply because they are expensive and made from aluminum.

Use a subwoofer.

Preferably a good one made by MartinLogan.

Where Do They Fit in the MartinLogan Lineup?

The Motion Discrete Cinema Series fills a fairly obvious hole between MartinLogan’s existing Motion SLM products and its larger conventional Motion and Motion XT loudspeakers.

The Motion SLM family already gives MartinLogan customers thin on-wall speakers designed to complement flat-panel televisions, including individual SLM models and the three-channel Motion SLM X3.

Motion Discrete Cinema is a considerably more ambitious interpretation of the same basic installation problem.

It incorporates MartinLogan’s newer Gen2 Folded Motion technology, offers substantially larger driver arrays and gives installers dedicated versions intended to complement 65, 75 and 85-inch displays.

The new series also overlaps the price territory of MartinLogan’s conventional Motion center-channel speakers, but that does not necessarily make Motion Discrete Cinema a higher-performance tier than Motion XT.

They are built for different jobs.

Motion XT remains MartinLogan’s premium conventional Motion range, including larger cabinets and the company’s Gen2 Folded Motion XT tweeter. Motion Discrete Cinema instead gives custom installers a premium shallow-depth alternative when conventional loudspeaker cabinets would interfere with the room design or television installation.

In other words, you’re paying partly for acoustics and partly for solving a very specific installation problem without reducing the front stage to a typical powered soundbar.

Designed for Custom Installation

The CI focus becomes even clearer when looking at the mounting hardware.

Every Motion Discrete Cinema model includes a universal wall bracket offering leveling and small positional adjustments, useful when wall studs refuse to cooperate with the architect’s carefully centered television.

An optional television bracket can attach to a display frame or VESA mounting pattern, allowing the loudspeaker to move with an articulating television.

MartinLogan has also integrated recessed cable channels into the aluminum chassis to conceal wiring, while removable Phoenix-style connectors with tool-free tension levers allow installers to terminate the speaker cable before the loudspeaker itself is mounted.

None of that will make anyone abandon dinner to stare at the specifications page, but installers will notice immediately. The difference between a clever mounting system and three hours of profanity behind an 85-inch television is not insignificant.

What Are the Closest Competitors?

The closest competition depends on which Motion Discrete Cinema configuration you are considering.

For the individual LCR speakers, the Focal On Wall 302 is arguably the most direct rival. At roughly the same price as the LCR9, it is another premium low-profile loudspeaker intended for home theater installations where conventional speaker cabinets are undesirable. It can also be mounted vertically or horizontally and uses four Flax midbass drivers surrounding Focal’s inverted-dome tweeter.

That makes it a credible alternative for someone building a premium low-profile LCR system around a large television.

For the three-channel models, the GoldenEar SuperCinema 3D Array XL is one of the most obvious competitors. It occupies similar pricing territory to the Soundbar 65 and also combines three passive front channels within a slim enclosure.

GoldenEar takes a somewhat different technical approach, using multiple midbass drivers, its High-Velocity Folded Ribbon tweeters and proprietary technology intended to create a soundstage wider than the enclosure itself.

MartinLogan’s advantage is the breadth of the new lineup.

Instead of offering one primary passive soundbar configuration, Motion Discrete Cinema provides dedicated 65, 75 and 85-inch models along with corresponding individual LCR speakers.

That gives integrators substantially more freedom to maintain a consistent visual and acoustic design across different rooms and screen sizes.

Pricing & Availability

MartinLogan expects the Motion Discrete Cinema Series to reach authorized dealers and custom integrators worldwide by the end of September 2026.

Motion Discrete Cinema LCR Speakers

• LCR5: $1,249.99 each
• LCR7: $1,499.99 each
• LCR9: $1,749.99 each

Motion Discrete Cinema Passive Soundbars

• Soundbar 65: $1,999.99
• Soundbar 75: $2,499.99
• Soundbar 85: $2,999.99

The Bottom Line

MartinLogan is not trying to reinvent the powered soundbar. Motion Discrete Cinema is aimed at customers who want the cleaner appearance of one without surrendering a properly amplified, discrete home theater system.

The ability to choose between separate LCR speakers and three-channel passive soundbars is useful, but the more unusual idea is scaling the driver array with the television itself. An 85-inch display gets a substantially different loudspeaker than a 65-inch model rather than the same acoustic platform wearing a longer grille.

That should make the series especially relevant to custom installers trying to reconcile increasingly enormous televisions with homeowners who have absolutely no interest in seeing enormous loudspeakers sitting beside them.

Physics still gets a vote, however, which is why MartinLogan wisely expects owners to add a subwoofer.

Some things even a very expensive piece of aluminum can’t negotiate.

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At IFA 2026, the huge tech show in Berlin, Germany, Nvidia announced that laptops running on its ARM-based RTX Spark chip will be available to buy from October.

The biggest names in the laptop industry, including Microsoft, Lenovo, HP, and Dell, will all have RTX Spark devices, and I got to spend a bit more time with some of them at Nvidia’s launch event.

Microsoft AI on Thursday released MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-recognition model the company says is faster, more accurate, and cheaper than anything OpenAI, Google, or ElevenLabs currently sells. Then it priced the thing at 10 cents per hour of audio.

That figure deserves a pause. When Microsoft AI shipped the first model in this line just five months ago, it charged $0.36 an hour. Thursday’s early-bird price cuts that by roughly 72%. For an enterprise processing 100,000 hours of call-center audio a year — a modest volume for a large bank or telecom — the bill drops from $36,000 to $10,000. At that level, transcription stops being a line item anyone argues about.

The release arrives as Microsoft executes a strategy that would have seemed implausible two years ago: building its own frontier-class models one modality at a time, then steadily swapping them into products that once ran on OpenAI’s technology. Transcription is the modality where that plan has moved fastest, and MAI-Transcribe-2 is its clearest proof point yet. It also offers a preview of how the world’s most valuable software company intends to compete in AI without depending on the partner it spent $13 billion to cultivate.

What MAI-Transcribe-2 does and why the feature list matters to enterprise buyers

The model transcribes audio in 60 languages, up from 43 in June’s MAI-Transcribe-1.5 and 25 in April’s original release. It runs on Microsoft Foundry, the company’s model marketplace for developers, and in MAI Playground, its testing environment. Microsoft says it built the model for the messy audio that real businesses generate — background noise, low-quality recordings, overlapping speech — rather than clean studio conditions.

More important than the language count is what Microsoft has bundled into the base product. Speaker diarization sorts out who said what in a multi-person recording, which is the difference between a wall of text and a usable meeting transcript. Word-level timestamps attach a precise time marker to every word, enabling search, editing, and alignment with video. Keyword biasing lets developers feed the model a list of drug names, product codes, or employee names so it stops mangling domain jargon. Automatic language identification means users no longer have to declare the language in advance.

Two features stand out for their specificity. A configurable output style offers a “verbatim” mode that preserves every “um,” false start, and stutter for compliance and legal teams, alongside a “clean” mode that strips fillers for readable captions and notes. And code switching handles conversations that drift between languages mid-sentence; Microsoft explicitly names Hinglish and Spanglish, a nod to the Indian and U.S. Hispanic markets where a single customer-service call might toggle languages a dozen times. Specialty vendors have historically charged premiums for each of these capabilities. Microsoft is including all of them for a dime.

How to read Microsoft’s FLEURS and Artificial Analysis benchmark claims

Microsoft makes three performance claims, each resting on a different measuring stick, and technical buyers should understand what each one captures and what it misses.

The first is that MAI-Transcribe-2 ranks number one on FLEURS across 60 languages with an average word error rate of 5.2%. FLEURS is a benchmark Google researchers published in 2022, built from native speakers reading roughly 2,000 sentences in each of 102 languages — about 12 hours of speech per language. It is the standard yardstick for multilingual speech recognition because it lets you compare a model’s Swahili against its Swedish on identical content. Word error rate, its metric, simply counts substitutions, insertions, and deletions against a human reference; 5.2% means roughly one word in 20 is wrong. But FLEURS is read speech, not conversation, and Microsoft’s average has actually risen from the 3.7% it reported for MAI-Transcribe-1.5 in June. That almost certainly reflects broader coverage rather than regression — averaging across 60 languages instead of 43 means folding in low-resource languages where every model struggles — but buyers should request the per-language breakdown.

The second claim is that the model ranks second on the Artificial Analysis word-error-rate leaderboard and defines that firm’s accuracy-latency Pareto frontier. Artificial Analysis is an independent benchmarker that tests models through their public APIs, measuring what a customer actually gets. Its index blends simulated agent conversations, European Parliament speeches, and corporate earnings calls, weighting heavily toward English business speech. In June, the firm ranked MAI-Transcribe-1.5 third at 2.4% WER, behind Alibaba’s Fun-Realtime-ASR-preview and ElevenLabs’ Scribe v2, while calling it the fastest model in the top 10. Climbing to second suggests Microsoft has cleared ElevenLabs. “Pareto frontier” is the phrase practitioners should note: it means no rival beats the model on accuracy without being slower, and none beats it on speed without being less accurate.

The third claim is raw speed — 10 times faster than OpenAI’s GPT-Transcribe, seven times faster than ElevenLabs’ Scribe v2, five times faster than Google’s Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, per Artificial Analysis evaluations. In batch transcription, speed matters less because anyone is waiting and more because throughput is cost. A model running at 300 times real-time needs a fraction of the GPU-hours of one running at 30 times. That efficiency is what lets Microsoft charge a dime and, presumably, still make money.

Three speech models in five months: inside Microsoft AI’s rapid release cadence

The pace is the story within the story. On April 2, MAI-Transcribe-1 launched with 25 languages at $0.36 per hour. On June 2, MAI-Transcribe-1.5 arrived with 43 languages, keyword biasing, and a third-place ranking on Artificial Analysis. Today, MAI-Transcribe-2 shipped with 60 languages, diarization, timestamps, code switching, a second-place ranking, and a price of $0.10.

Three releases in five months, each expanding language coverage by roughly 40% while adding features competitors gate behind premium tiers. That cadence is characteristic of a team that has settled on a stable architecture and is now turning the crank on data and scale — the phase where speech models tend to improve quickly and predictably. It is also the cadence of a company that intends to make transcription a commodity before anyone else can.

The organizational bet behind that speed is one Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft AI’s chief executive, described to The Verge in April. He credited the first model to “a small, focused 10-person team” that had been “liberated from any of the bureaucracy,” with a larger surrounding group handling vendor management and data acquisition.

He also told The Verge the model ran at “half the GPU cost of the other state-of-the-art models,” calling it “a huge cost-saving” for Microsoft. Meta, Amazon, Google, and Anthropic have all experimented with similar flattened structures, The Verge noted. Microsoft’s transcription line is the most visible test yet of whether the approach produces commercial results rather than research papers.

Why Microsoft is building its own AI models despite its $13 billion OpenAI bet

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, and hosts OpenAI’s models across Azure, Office, and Copilot. For most of the past four years, the obvious question about any Microsoft-built model has been: why bother? The answer has sharpened over the past year, and it begins with independence.

When Microsoft hired Suleyman from Inflection AI in March 2024, along with most of Inflection’s staff, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff read it as a declaration of intent. “Microsoft is building their own AI and I don’t think Microsoft will use OpenAI in the future. They’ll have their own frontier models,” Benioff told CNBC in January 2025. “That’s why they hired Mustafa Suleyman.” Benioff had his own motives — Salesforce competes with Microsoft and invests in Anthropic — but events have largely borne him out.

In October 2025, Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership in a deal that, per Microsoft’s own announcement, allowed Microsoft to “independently pursue AGI alone or in partnership with third parties” for the first time. Suleyman told The Verge that renegotiation “unlocked [Microsoft’s] ability to pursue superintelligence,” and Microsoft announced its MAI Superintelligence team weeks later. In April 2026, the companies amended the deal again, ending Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s models and eliminating Microsoft’s revenue-share payments, according to reports at the time. Each amendment loosened the tie. Each one was followed by more MAI models.

How Microsoft’s in-house models are cutting costs across Teams, Word, and Excel

The second half of the answer is margin. Every prompt Microsoft routes to an OpenAI model carries a cost. Every prompt it routes to its own model on its own GPUs carries a smaller one. In July, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft had begun using MAI models to answer a portion of user prompts in Word and Excel — products it had previously advertised as powered by OpenAI and Anthropic. TechCrunch framed the shift as part of a broader industry pullback on AI spending, with Amazon, Uber, Meta, and Accenture all reportedly trimming.

Transcription is the natural first target for this substitution because the problem is bounded and the metric is objective. Microsoft owns Teams, which generates an enormous volume of meeting audio. It owns Nuance, whose clinical documentation business runs on speech recognition. It owns the Azure speech services that thousands of enterprises already call. Every one of those workloads is a candidate to move onto MAI-Transcribe-2, and every hour that moves is an hour Microsoft no longer pays anyone else for.

Suleyman has been unusually candid that this is the point. Superintelligence, he told The Verge in April, “is really about, ‘Are these models capable of delivering product value for the millions of enterprises that depend on us to deliver world-class language models?’” Whatever one thinks of applying the word “superintelligence” to a transcription API, the commercial logic is plain: build the capability once, deploy it across a dozen products, and stop writing checks to a partner that is increasingly a competitor.

MAI-Transcribe-2 vs. OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs: the competitive picture

Microsoft’s release names four rivals: OpenAI’s GPT-Transcribe, Google’s Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, OpenAI’s older Whisper V3-Large, and ElevenLabs’ Scribe v2. It does not mention Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Speechmatics, or Rev — the specialists that have sold transcription to enterprises for a decade. Microsoft is positioning against the frontier labs, not the incumbents.

That framing is partly marketing and partly true. The frontier labs have treated speech as a checkbox feature of broader platforms, priced accordingly, and a dedicated model that beats them on speed by five to 10 times while matching their accuracy is a genuine differentiator. But the specialists will feel the price pressure most acutely. At $0.10 an hour, Microsoft is pricing at or below where many of them sell high-volume enterprise contracts, and it is bundling diarization, timestamps, and 60 languages into the base rate. The specialists’ remaining moat is domain depth — medical vocabularies, legal formatting, industry-specific integrations — and Microsoft’s keyword biasing feature is aimed squarely at it.

The one competitor Microsoft conspicuously does not claim to beat on accuracy is Alibaba, whose models have posted leading numbers on independent leaderboards for much of 2026. TechCrunch reported in July that some U.S. companies had begun evaluating Chinese models as cheaper alternatives despite security concerns. Microsoft’s pitch to those buyers is implicit but unmistakable: comparable accuracy, faster inference, lower price, and a vendor your compliance team already trusts.

The questions technical decision makers should ask before switching transcription vendors

For all its specificity on benchmarks, the release leaves several practical questions open. The first is duration: Microsoft calls $0.10 per hour a launch offer without naming an end date or a standard rate, and anyone building a cost model should get both in writing. The second is streaming. The release emphasizes batch throughput and long-form audio but says nothing about real-time transcription, which voice agents and live captioning require. Artificial Analysis maintains a separate streaming leaderboard, and Microsoft’s silence on it is notable.

The third is per-language accuracy. A 5.2% average across 60 languages could mean 3% on major languages and 12% on low-resource ones, so buyers with specific needs should test those languages directly. The fourth is diarization quality. Word error rate does not measure speaker attribution; a transcript can have near-perfect WER and still assign every other sentence to the wrong person. The release offers no diarization error rate or comparable metric.

The fifth is data handling. Enterprise transcription touches medical records, legal privilege, and financial disclosures, and the release says nothing about data residency, retention, or whether audio submitted to Foundry feeds future training. Microsoft’s April announcements described training data as a mix of human-curated recordings, contractor-recorded noisy audio, and “vast amounts of data from the open web,” per The Verge — a description that should prompt pointed questions from regulated industries. None of these gaps is unusual for a launch announcement, but they are exactly the questions that separate a leaderboard win from a production deployment.

What Microsoft’s speech model strategy reveals about its broader AI ambitions

Step back from the speech-recognition details and a pattern emerges that extends well beyond transcription. Microsoft’s AI unit now ships models for images, voice, transcription, code, reasoning, and cybersecurity. At Build in June, it announced seven new MAI models in a singlekeynote. Each follows the same playbook: target a well-defined modality, optimize aggressively for inference cost, price below the frontier labs, distribute through Foundry, and quietly swap the model into Microsoft’s own products.

This is not an attempt to build one model that beats GPT or Gemini at everything. It is an attempt to build a portfolio of specialized models that, in aggregate, let Microsoft serve most of its enterprise workloads without paying anyone else — and to sell the surplus capacity to everyone else at prices the specialists cannot match. Transcription happened to be the first modality where the approach fully matured, but the release notes for MAI-Transcribe-2 read less like a product announcement than a template.

Suleyman has spent two years talking about “humanist superintelligence” and AI assistants that are “accountable to them, on their side.” The vocabulary is lofty. The execution is a spreadsheet. Five months ago, Microsoft charged 36 cents to turn an hour of speech into text. On Thursday it charged a dime, threw in six features its rivals sell separately, and claimed the top spot on the industry’s standard multilingual benchmark. The company that spent $13 billion learning what frontier AI costs has decided it would rather own the factory than rent the output — and now it is selling the output for less than the rent.

MAI-Transcribe-2 is available now through Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground.

How large does a digital movie collection need to become before storage starts getting a little ridiculous?

Kaleidescape apparently thinks 246TB is a reasonable place to find out.

At CEDIA Expo 2026, the company introduced the Compact Terra Prime 246TB SSD Movie Server, its highest-capacity server to date. What makes it more interesting than another exercise in storage excess is the packaging: Kaleidescape has squeezed two 123TB solid-state drives into the same compact chassis used by the Strato K 8K movie player.

For perspective, the full-size Terra Prime 120TB introduced earlier this year suddenly looks rather modest.

The new model is aimed at very large Kaleidescape collections, whole-home installations and marine systems where multiple Strato players need immediate access to a centralized movie library.

And presumably people who regard deleting a downloaded movie as a personal failure. It appears someone at Kaleidescape finally read my email.

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How Much Fits on 246TB?

Kaleidescape estimates the Compact Terra Prime can store approximately 4,000 conventional 4K movies, 2,300 4K Cinematic or 8K movies, 6,600 HD movies, or 37,000 SD titles.

There is an important distinction with that 2,300 figure. It represents storage capacity based on typical file sizes; it does not mean Kaleidescape currently offers 2,300 native 8K movies.

The company offers more than 14,000 titles across its supported formats, while its newer 4K Cinematic and 8K playback capabilities are tied to the Strato K platform.

Storage requirements are also moving upward. Kaleidescape says 4K Cinematic downloads average approximately 1.5 times the size of its conventional 4K versions, with average bitrates around 110 Mbps. The format can retain chroma information up to 4:4:4 and was introduced alongside Strato K in June 2026.

Strato K itself includes a 960GB SSD, which is useful for a small standalone library but can hold only about seven 4K Cinematic titles. Connecting it to Terra storage removes that constraint and lets the player concentrate on playback while the server maintains the collection.

That makes a huge server considerably easier to understand, even if most home theater owners will never come remotely close to needing this much capacity.

SSD Changes More Than Storage Capacity

The existing Terra Prime 120TB uses four removable hard drives in a traditional full-width component. Moving to SSDs allows the 246TB version to deliver considerably more capacity in a chassis less than half as wide.

There are also performance advantages.

With a 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet connection, Kaleidescape says a high-bitrate 4K movie can download in as little as four minutes.

The more relevant specification for large custom installations may be simultaneous playback. One server can provide high-bitrate 4K content to as many as 25 network-connected Strato players.

Nobody needs 25 movie zones in a two-bedroom condo.

In a large residence, yacht or other professionally integrated system, that capability starts making considerably more sense.

Almost One Petabyte of Kaleidescape

If 246TB somehow proves inadequate, Kaleidescape allows up to four Compact Terra Prime SSD servers to operate together.

That creates a maximum combined capacity of 984TB, just shy of one petabyte.

Kaleidescape says three of the new servers provide sufficient capacity for its entire current Movie Store based on typical storage requirements.

This is where the intended customer becomes fairly obvious. Someone building a modest single-room Kaleidescape system can choose the Strato E, Strato M, Strato K and considerably smaller Terra options already in the lineup.

The 246TB server exists for installations where users want an enormous collection stored locally and available instantly throughout the property without continually deciding what stays downloaded.

Kaleidescape has never been about cloud streaming. Purchased movies are downloaded to local storage and then played directly from the system, which allows the company to use movie files and bitrates that would be impractical for conventional streaming services.

Increasing local storage therefore becomes increasingly useful as Kaleidescape pushes toward higher-quality downloads.

What About Price?

Kaleidescape has not announced a fixed MSRP for the Compact Terra Prime 246TB SSD.

The server is available now on a special-order basis through authorized Kaleidescape dealers.

That is probably just as well.

For context, the Terra Prime 120TB sells for $34,995, before adding a Strato movie player. Two 123TB enterprise-class SSDs are not exactly something you pick up from the impulse aisle at Costco, so attempting to reverse-engineer a retail price from consumer SSD pricing would be pointless.

Anyone genuinely shopping for one will be speaking with an authorized integrator anyway.

Specifications

• Product: Kaleidescape Compact Terra Prime SSD Movie Server
• Storage: 246TB
• Drives: 2 x 123TB SSD
• Approximate Storage: 2,300 8K or 4K Cinematic movies; 4,000 4K movies; 6,600 HD movies; 37,000 SD movies
• Download Speed: High-bitrate 4K movie in as little as 4 minutes
• Simultaneous Playback: Up to 25 network-connected Strato players
• Networking: 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet recommended; 1 Gigabit minimum
• USB: USB 3.0, reserved
• Dimensions: 7.87 x 1.52 x 10 inches
• Weight: 4 pounds
• Typical Power Consumption: 22 watts
• Maximum Power Consumption: 42 watts
• Typical Fan Noise: 20 dB(A)
• Construction: Black anodized aluminum
• Rack Mounting: Optional 1U shelf supports one or two compact units
• Supported Storage: 8K, 4K Cinematic, 4K Dolby Vision, 4K HDR10, 4K SDR, HD and SD Kaleidescape downloads
• Availability: Available now by special order through authorized Kaleidescape dealers

The Bottom Line

The Compact Terra Prime 246TB SSD is clearly not intended to make Kaleidescape more affordable. Strato E and Strato M have already taken on that job by lowering the cost of entering the ecosystem.

This product pushes in the other direction.

Kaleidescape is building an increasingly scalable platform in which a relatively simple single-room system can coexist with installations serving dozens of playback zones and enormous locally stored collections. Strato K and 4K Cinematic have also increased the amount of data required to deliver the company’s best video quality, making higher-capacity storage more than just a game of spec-sheet one-upmanship.

Does anyone really need almost a quarter-petabyte of movie storage in one box?

Probably not many people.

But the customers who do were unlikely to be satisfied with 120TB anyway.

For more information: kaleidescape.com

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The takeaway: Microsoft has identified a new malware campaign that uses fake CAPTCHA prompts to trick Windows users into running malicious commands. The campaign, called TerminalFix, is a variation of the ClickFix attacks that have become increasingly common among business users. The campaign highlights a broader security problem: familiar browser prompts can now bypass technical safeguards by convincing users to execute the attacker’s code themselves.

The pages impersonate Cloudflare and other trusted services. Instead of presenting a normal CAPTCHA challenge, they instruct users to open PowerShell or Command Prompt and paste in a command.

That is the main difference between TerminalFix and earlier ClickFix activity. ClickFix attacks often direct victims to the Windows Run dialog, where a command is used to install an information stealer. TerminalFix, by contrast, uses PowerShell or Command Prompt, making it easier for attackers to execute longer, multi-line scripts.

Microsoft said the change increases “the likelihood that complex, multi-line scripts execute successfully.”

The campaign is designed to do more than infect a single computer. After a user runs the command, TerminalFix can begin a multi-stage intrusion that gives the attacker persistent proxy access through the compromised machine. That access can provide a route into other parts of a company’s network.

An attacker with access to an unsecured network could use the initially infected system to steal data, spread malware to other devices, or install ransomware. The extent of the damage would depend on the victim’s network controls, endpoint security, and user permissions.

TerminalFix relies on social engineering rather than a hidden software exploit. The attacker needs the user to follow the instructions on the fake verification page, making employee awareness an important line of defense.

A CAPTCHA that asks someone to open PowerShell, Command Prompt, or the Windows Run dialog should be treated as suspicious. Legitimate CAPTCHA services do not require users to run system commands to prove they are human.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence has published mitigation guidance for organizations. The company recommends restricting access to PowerShell and the Windows Run dialog when possible, monitoring systems for signs of DLL sideloading, blocking Flash plugins, and enabling cloud-delivered protection in Microsoft Defender Antivirus.

Those controls may not be appropriate for every employee or device. IT administrators, developers, and other technical users may need access to scripting tools as part of their jobs. Companies can still reduce risk by limiting those tools to users who need them and monitoring for unusual command activity.

Security teams should also review which older software remains installed across their environments. Microsoft’s guidance to block Flash plugins, for example, shows how outdated components can create additional paths for attackers even when they are no longer needed for daily work.

The campaign is primarily a concern for enterprise networks, where one compromised device can provide a path to more valuable systems and data. But the basic advice applies to individual users as well. Do not run a PowerShell or Command Prompt command simply because a website asks you to, especially when the request is presented as a CAPTCHA or security check.

Windscribe has reduced its annual plan from $69 to $39 upfront ($3.25/month), just in time for the new academic year.

The plan includes unlimited simultaneous connections — a feature missing from competitors like NordVPN or Proton — along with a built-in ad, tracker, and malware blocker.

Its user-friendly apps are available across desktop, mobile, and many smart TVs, so it can cover everything you need: whether you’re securing public Wi-Fi in the library or streaming back in the dorm.

Crucially, this isn’t a first-year teaser rate. You’ll be billed $39 every 12 months for as long as you keep the subscription active, avoiding the steep renewal price hikes standard across the VPN industry.

Few premium VPNs match this pricing, particularly when accounting for renewal costs. For example, NordVPN‘s one-year plans start at $65.88, over $20 more, and renew at $139 per year. It’s a similar story when you look at the likes of Surfshark and ExpressVPN, too.

It’s also among the fastest VPNs we reviewed during our most recent tests, achieving over 2,000 Mbps over WireGuard. Plus, it reliably unblocks major streaming platforms and bypasses regional internet blocks.

If you’re not keen on Windscribe but want to keep top speeds, PrivadoVPN is another top choice that achieved over 2000 Mbps in testing. Equally, for streaming performance, no VPN performed better than NordVPN with global services this time around.

If you want to test it first, Windscribe offers a solid free tier. While bandwidth and server locations are capped, it gives you a risk-free way to test the interface before upgrading.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Adobe Graphic Design Bundle has 3 courses designed to help you learn the essentials of graphic design and how to apply those skills to your projects. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You’ll learn all aspects of the design process. It’s on sale for $50.

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