The shape of things to come?

From the "New York Times":
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html?th&emc=th

 

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OOps! Sorry (I am registered). Here 'tis:

Rip and Burn and Download on a Stereo
JUST because a bunch of individual ingredients are delicious doesn't mean they'll taste good when they're all cooked up together. Ask anyone who's ever sampled a 5-year-old chef's rendition of chocolate chip spaghetti with meat sauce and grape jelly.

Similarly, many an electronics company has tried and failed to slap together a decent product from buzzword-compliant components - say, iPods, wireless networks, sound systems and personal computers.

So you might not have high hopes for the Olive Symphony, a $900 hi-fi component (www.olive.us) that merges all of those technologies and more. But instead of creating a multiheaded digital Frankenstereo, the company managed to make all of those technologies and features feel natural together. The resulting box takes a long time to describe, because it does so much. But it takes surprisingly little time to master, and most of its features are usable whether you own a computer or not.

If you're looking for a one-line description, well, think of the Symphony as an iPod for your stereo. Inside is a completely silent, fanless, 80-gigabyte hard drive that stores up to 20,000 songs. (A 160-gigabyte model, the Musica, is available for $1,100. It has a fan, but you'd practically have to climb inside the thing to hear it.) The back panel has both analog and digital outputs to your sound system.

The front panel's scroll wheel and bright, monochrome screen permit quick navigation through gigantic music collections by song title, playlist, album name and so on.

Now, Olive isn't the first company to invent a stereo component with a hard drive. What makes the Symphony, which will be shipped to stores next week, so interesting is all the different ways music gets onto and off of it.

Take the built-in CD player, for example. When you slip a CD into the slot and press the glowing Play button, the music begins. The song and band names appear on the screen in huge letters, visible from across the room, courtesy of the machine's built-in two-million-album database of album and track names.

By pressing one button, you can copy the CD onto the Symphony's hard drive. The process takes about 45 seconds a song; you choose the audio format and quality setting. (You get the quoted 20,000-song capacity only with the MP3 format, which is not exactly the audiophile's dream. Choose WAV, AIFF or FLAC for better quality. These are lossless formats - meaning "adored by classical music nuts"- that fill up the hard drive much faster. The Symphony stores about 2,000 songs in FLAC format.)

And what if you have 1,200 CD's? Are you really expected to sit there, drumming your fingers, feeding the box another disc every nine minutes?

Don't be silly. Olive has made an offer you can't refuse: it will preload all of your CD's onto a new Symphony's hard drive. You just pay for one-way shipping for the discs. (This offer is good until at least Jan. 1, 2006. Even after that, the service will always be available, but it won't always be free.)

The Symphony box can also rescue your old records and tapes. If you're willing to connect your tape deck or record player to the Symphony, it can turn each song into a full-blown digital track that behaves just like the songs you've copied from a CD.

Once your music collection is safely ensconced on the Symphony, you can exile the original CD's, tapes and records to the attic. From now on, you can call up any album right on the screen. You can also mix and match tracks into playlists of your own. Better yet, the Symphony's CD player is also a CD recorder, so you can burn your music - including the tunes you've rescued from your old tapes and LP's - onto shiny new CD's.

If your head hasn't yet exploded, there's more: you can also connect an iPod or any MP3 player directly to a U.S.B. jack on the Symphony (which also recharges the player). Amazingly, the iPod's own music collection now appears on the Symphony's screen, ready for playing through your stereo system. (The Symphony does not, however, play copy-protected files, like songs from the iTunes music store.) You can also copy music from the Symphony's hard drive to the iPod, thus getting extra mileage from all the work you (or Olive) did in transferring your CD collection. That is, the Symphony box lets you load and manage an iPod even if you don't own a computer - an industry first.

In fact, the Symphony doesn't even wipe out all of the music that's already on the iPod; it's content to add, not replace. Over all, this Symphony-to-iPod copying business is a pretty slick trick. (With the new video iPod, it's a trick that needs work. In my tests, copying songs from the Symphony had the bizarre side effect of stripping away all the video from the iPod's TV shows, leaving only the audio. The company promises a fix within days.)

Even this, however, is not the end of the Symphony's résumé. It also has a wireless (Wi-Fi) network antenna, so that it can join your home network. Suddenly, there are all kinds of other possibilities.

For example, suppose you keep your music collection in iTunes (the free jukebox software) on your Mac or PC upstairs. That music library shows up on the Symphony box, ready to play on your much nicer sound system downstairs.

In fact, the same stunt works in reverse: the Symphony also shows up as an icon in the iTunes software, so that you can play its music collection on your computer. In this age of copy-protection paranoia, you just wouldn't expect to find this sort of flexibility and simplicity.

Network nerds will be even more impressed to learn that the Symphony is not just a Wi-Fi receiver; it's also a full-blown access point (wireless router) in its own right. That is, if you plug a cable or D.S.L. modem into the back panel, all wireless laptops in the house can share its fast Internet connection. Not yet wireless? Stand back: the Symphony is even a four-port Ethernet router. You can plug four computers directly into it to create a network.

What does all this mean to non-geeks? Simply that the Symphony box and your computers can play each other's music collections across a home network. You can also drag music files directly from your computer to the Symphony's hard drive. You can even use your computer's keyboard to manage song names and playlists; the Symphony's playlist-management software appears in, of all things, your Web browser.

(Olive also supplies a dedicated, more elegant playlist-management program for Mac OS X only.)

Those networking features also mean that the Symphony can be linked to the Internet, making it easy to download to the box new features and updates of CD track names on new albums.

Finally, the Internet connection also permits the Symphony to tune into Internet radio stations. Over 1,000 are listed when you open the package, organized by genre, and you can add your own.

Clearly, this is a machine with vast potential for musical pleasure - and for confusion. In general, the simple, iPoddish, drill-down-to-the-right-menu system keeps all these features easy to find. There's plenty to learn and troubleshoot, however, especially at the outset.

For example, adding this or any machine to a wireless network can be an evening-long headache, especially because you have to tap in your network password using the remote's number pad. Copying songs from a CD seems quick, but a very long period of post-processing is required before they're available for playback on your computer or copying to your iPod. And although the machine itself is sleek, black and beautiful (the more expensive Musica is silver), the remote control is a surprisingly cheesy, plastic, nonilluminated afterthought.

But Olive has big plans for its audio system. For example, in December it intends to offer a companion device called the Sonata ($200), a small, wireless receiver that hooks up to speakers or even to clock radios. You can park Sonatas in up to 20 rooms of the house; each can be playing different music from the Symphony's hard drive.

So, no, you can't mash together a bunch of trendy ingredients and expect to produce a successful dish. But a master chef can create a triumphant whole even from a disparate jumble of different ingredients - just as long as one of them is an Olive.

 

If it sounds any good, it could be tempting; I could connect the Olive to my "olive" Naim amps - he he

 

If it has a CD player why not just listen to CDs?

 

Looks great and their Musica model matches the Nad Silver line to boot. Tempting. I asked them if they'd ship outside the US and Canada.

The only thing I don't like about it is their reference to disk capacity in number of "Songs". Don't they do Cantatas?

 

Interesting toys. Everyday my present single disc CD player and DVD player look more and more like dinosaurs from a time so far back in time.

 

This is the reply I got from Olive Connect today:

Thank you for your interest in our product.


The Musica and Symphony are sold in Europe by our joint-venture partner Hermstedt (the Musica is called Hifidelio Pro, the Symphony is called Hifidelio).


For UK sales please contact


www.opposition-group.co.uk


For other countries please contact Mrs. Annette Hermstedt at [email protected].


Enjoy your day.


Best regards

Quite reactive actually.

 

Music server solutions have been around for a long time. They're part of the backbone of most multi-room audio systems. Each year there's something new and slick on the market that moves the techology forward. iPod integration was the big story at the IFA expo in Berlin this year. It looks like Symphony has taken this one step further, and at what appears to be a very attractive price too.

 

Seems pretty impressive! As Dom says though, depends on sound quality.

I wonder when the video version will follow. Store all your music, MOvies and perhaps digital photo's and such.

Be very interested to hear the thoughts of anyone who gets there hands on one of these.

 

The court battle that will determine the life or death of video media servers is being fought right now. At the heart of it is the American manufacturer Kaleidescape.

Ripping and streaming video is possible right now if you have the time patience and knowledge; but Kaleidescape is a one box solution that makes the process simple and quick. The film studios stand in opposition. Their argument being that storage on a server circumvents macrovision and infringes copyright.

I know for a fact that several other manufacturers have AV servers waiting in the wings pending the outcome of this court battle.

 

My first thoughts are: 1. conceptually good 2. small hard drive - needs to be 400GB and have slots to add additional drives if it were to appeal to me.

 

very interesting, both the reference to the Olive Symphony and to Kaleidescape. Among other matters (and there's a lot of matters) this raises the AV vs dedicated music issue. Money and attention is going into AV, that is what will drive development on and prices down, especially for home/consumer products. Will stereo music reproduction be well served within the AV products or should we vote with our wallets for the music products - with all that may mean?

I wonder how much the Olive Symphony [Hermstedt Hifidelio Pro (Musica) and Hifidelio (Symphony) ] will cost, and what timelines will be. Also, what real advantages of buying European/UK would be - what with usual £/$ mark-ups. weary of suggesting a power-buy but would be good to have some contact with the company.

 

FWIW I think it will be a long time before audiophiles choose a HD server as a main source. Your ears are too sensitive to the minute differences between players, cables and even supports; so the differences a server would introduce are just too significant compared to a dedicated CD player. On top of that there's always the cost issue.

So if this isn't a product for audiophiles then just who is it aimed at?

IMO the answer is a new type of customer. Someone who enjoys music but values convenience as an equal priority. Think professional couple with teenage kids, the sort of people who might have bought B&O for its design or chosen Bose as a compromise towards discrete styling. They're having this installed as whole house audio system because it caters for everyone. Some of the more progressive house builders are even pre-wiring their new builds as standard. It's a different market to the dedicated 2 channel audiophile and the typical AV enthusiast.

As for storage, there are already some products on the market that can accept up to 2 Terrabytes of HD storage, though for most people the option of 400Gb is more than enough. Yamaha MusicCast is one.

Other HD server solutions include
Sonos and Opus

 

appreciate the insight. So what's your take on the way forward for a two-channel guy with some AV enthusiasm? Do you have a plan?

I see the problem in three parts:

1) content acquisition [from Internet (as files or as stream)/extraction from CDs/retroconvert from analogue sources]

2) conversion/storage/conversion

3) delivery/play - including distribution to points for listening, ie into a dac on hifi stand as well as onto a portable for travel/walkabout.

Any one product/system is likely to cover each base but perhaps none is likely to best of breed in each.

further thoughts pl

[btw, this is more than 'chat' - could it be moved?]

 

Good point. I think the drawback with HDD-based hi-fi, is the lifespan of the HDD. I don't fancy going through the whole load-up-the-cd-collection routine every time the HDD packs in. Unless they use unusually reliable drives. In seven years of PC operation I have gone through three HDDs. Not budget ones either...

 

But if you run 2 HDD in tandem failiure is not catastrophic. Besides I know of at least one person who has gone through three laser mechs in the last 5 years on his "hi-end" cd player. The replacement cost of the mechs was as much as a 400gb HDD.

 

surely a back-up (digital) storage device would be preferable/cheaper than 2HDD - the twin HDD approach is more fitted to 24/7 service.

in the longer run, it ought to be possible to register ownership/licence of (legally-bought) collection with those who want us to pay for music, and have them provide the back-up. then if there is loss or format change we can download what we have legimately bought.

 

Very true, don't I just know it! My laser has packed in... but I only have put the one cd back in when I get it back from being fixed, not 700-odd.

What kind of storage do you mean?

That would be ideal providing it could be downloaded uncompressed, or at least FLAC or somesuch. I think the music industry would be unlikely to ever make this possible though. Pity.

 

Rod, back-up storage is generally off-line. in offices, where ideally PCs are on a network, perhaps sharing a filestore (ie a HDD or set of disks), this can be done automatically, usually daily. I doubt that many home PCs are backed up at all - which means when a HD fails, its tears before bedtime. packing up critical material from HDs onto dvds is one way, but for large-scale content, there are digital tape drives. others here will be better placed to give further advice.

On the longer-run comment, I believe that it will become untennable to claim/secure income for digital content - there will have to be some real value-add service that makes it worthwhile complying by buying legit licence. So my suggestion is a business proposition.