Features and Design

The Olive Symphony possesses the usual controls you’d find on a CD player, in addition to a two-level jog shuttle and four buttons on the right for menu navigation (if that’s reminiscent of the iPod, it might be due to the fact that the company making Olive is a subsidiary of a German firm that provides products for Macintosh computers), with everything appearing clearly on a backlit screen. Learning is intuitive and easy, requiring only a small learning curve and glances at the manual.

So, how does it work? Put a CD in the transport, and the Play button begins to glow. Press it, and there’s a much better-than-average chance the name of the disc and track will appear on the screen, thanks to a built-in two million track database (although, to be fair, it didn’t work on some of my more obscure world music recordings). Want to add the disc to the Symphony’s hard drive? All you do is press a single button. Best of all, especially for audiophile classical buffs, you have your choice of format, all in 32-bit processing. There’s the ubiquitous mp3 (from 128-320 kbps), of course, but also uncompressed WAV, AIFF, and the compressed FLAC, all of which are lossless in sound quality. Although the Symphony claims to hold 20,000 tracks on its drive, that’s only in mp3; you’ll only pack on about one-tenth of that in FLAC. Should you want to burn a CD from your tracks, that’s also accomplished with remarkable ease.

And with two USB 2.0 ports at the rear, you can attach external hard drives with your own music to import (easily done by pressing the Import button). That would be ample, but it’s only the beginning. Attach your mp3 player to the USB port, and your music shows up on the Symphony—although it won’t play anything that’s copy-protected, so if you’ve bought a lot from iTunes, you’re out of luck. And you can download tracks from the Symphony directly to your player without needing a computer.

Is that enough? No. It’s easy to see that this was designed by true music-loving nerds. If you still have old vinyl (or even—shudder—cassettes), you can connect your equipment to the symphony, and suddenly every track will be there on the hard drive in a sparkling digital form, with all those clicks and scratches lovingly preserved.

People who keep a lot of music on their computers (I prefer external hard drives, in case of crashes) and use a wireless network at home are in for a treat. Like a geek’s dream, the Symphony has a wireless 802.11g antenna, so you can make it part of your network. Once you’ve done that, the library from your computer shows up on the symphony—and vice versa—and you can see the icon in iTunes (I didn’t try it with my MusicMatch). But unlike your noisy computer, music from the Symphony’s hard drive plays without the background soundtrack of a fan; it’s a fan-less unit. But even if you’re not wireless, you can still hook it into your wired network using the four—that’s right, four—Ethernet connectors at the back. So, you can sit at the keyboard and drag music files back and forth between the computer and Symphony or edit and tag tracks. The manufacturers do supply what looks to be a heady playlist-management program for classical fans. However, it only operates in Mac OSX, and my friend has PCs. But he likes digital radio, and the machine’s Internet connection allows him to access all those thousands of stations broadcasting into cyberspace.

The Symphony can also supposedly stream music to up to five different computers at once. I didn’t test that many, but it worked well, sending different music to each of the house’s three computers—one son listened to Offspring, another Blink 82, while the parents and I relaxed with some old Steeleye Span and a glass of wine.

Image Courtesy of Olive