What's the deal with things like the Olive Music Player

[joshnich]

I guess they are called music servers but since I am utterly and completely naive when it comes to anything related to music and computers I could be wrong! I see that Jacksonbart has one or at least he seems to be promoting them so I assume he has one. I guess these units store digital music and somehow play it back in a way that lets the operator pick what he wants to listen to. Is this just a big I pod? Having heard an I pod I cannot imagine anyone wanting a big one or anyone for that matter. Is the quality better on these? Do they rival high end CD players? I would be interested in what anyone ( or almost anyone) has to say about these things. If they deliver they could be pretty cool.

Josh

[jacksonbart]

The Olive product in some ways is like a big IPOD, though it does support recording your music in WAV/FLAC and other lossless formats. Based on what version you get you can get the latest and greatest D/A chips and upgraded power supplies. Also it can tie into your existing wireless network or become its own network to allow wireless control (from a PDA or laptop) and internet radio. It can stream music to other PCs. You can record to it via analog sources, ie LPs. It burns CDs, etc. I enjoy mine, but I think for the $ if you know what software and hardware you want you can build your own music server pc as well. For me it works well, there is no fan, so no fan noise, its the size of a small CD player and offers a intuitive interface from the front of the unit. In some ways its less flexible than your own PC, but the interface is so much easier to use than a PC server, which is basically what I have up in the office only its just MP3s. The Olive is in the basement. Also it has its own meta data for CD recognition so if you don't have internet connected to it, it will recognize your CDs for the most part. Basically the whole thing is very simple to use and listening to a CD via a Denon 3910 or via the same song using FLAC on the Olive sounds the same to my ears (I am the D/As on my Denon receiver in both cases). Take a look around and think long about building your own music server. The Olive is not perfect (I want it to offer wireless N, right now its just G), I like it, but thats me. I have no personal interest in the company.

http://www.olive.us/home/home.html

[LeeW]

Josh,

I'm using the Escient AVX-211 with an external tube Dac. It also controls my movie collection. If there is any sound quality difference it is very minimal to my ears.

http://www.escient.com/index.html

Lee