Digital Trends

Olive Symphony

January 22nd, 2006 | by Chris Nickson

Testing and Use

At this point, it sounds close to perfect, and its easy operation and sensible manual make most things quite straightforward. But, inevitably, there are downsides. I didn't have to experience it, but I was told that adding the Symphony to the wireless home network was a slow and painful process—and this from someone who's very techno-savvy. And unlike ripping a CD on your computer, where it's immediately available in the library, the Symphony takes a surprisingly long while to process all the information before the music is available.

According to the specs, it's possible to import Ogg Vorbis files into the Symphony. However, in practice that seemed impossible. They have to be transformed into other formats prior to moving them. And once they're in the machine, there's no way to convert them to FLAC—all that has to be done on the computer beforehand, which can make for a few convoluted procedures. And files can only be imported in 16-bit, so make sure they are the correct bit-rate before you import. I accidentally brought in a track in 24-bit, and when I tried to play it found myself listening to white noise—not the most pleasant experience, and it took a while before I figured out the cause.

While it's primarily a digital music center, the Olive Symphony is also most decidedly a part of your stereo setup, hooking up to your amplifier or receiver via RCA analog or the S/P DIF digital outputs and playing like a normal component with excellent fidelity—especially on expensive systems, where the nuances of a performance and recording can be properly heard and appreciated. You can set the volume level for the Symphony, ensuring all the music it plays will be at that volume, which is useful for quieting some loud passages and enhancing quiet ones, evening out the dynamics.

For those who'd appreciate the Symphony in every room, even those without computers, the company has recently introduced the Sonata, a small wireless receiver that can be hooked up to supposedly 20 stereos throughout the house, each playing a different stream. But at $199 each, it's a relatively expensive way to spread the sound. Still, a person can dream...

Those with real money to spend can fork out $1099 and buy the Musica. The main differences between it and the Symphony are color (the Musica is silver as opposed to Symphony's black) and hard drive size (160GB compared to 80GB). From the specs on the company website (http://www.olive.us/), it's the same machine with a bigger belly.

If you're thinking of buying a Symphony, but have a large CD collection and can't face the prospect of ripping disc after disc onto the hard drive, Olive does have a great offer to tempt prospective customers:  Order the device from them, ship the CDs to them via Fed Ex, and they'll rip your entire collection onto the hard drive free of charge. Then they'll return your CDs along with a fully loaded Symphony or Musica. However, if the amount of music is large enough, it's going to cost a fair amount in freight, so you might be advised to think twice.