Sunday, August 07, 2005
Olive Symphony
The Symphony provides comprehensive and easy sharing features. It stores music, works with shared iTunes libraries, and shares its own library as well. It even connects directly with iPods, and can work as a complete wireless base station. Consider making this the hub of your digital music, freeing up your Mac's disk space and making it available around the house.
The Symphony is the closest thing to a traditional serious piece of hi-fi equipment we have seen in this arena. In fact, that's exactly what it is: a highly desirable professional hi-fi product, but with comprehensive storage, networking and streaming abilities as well. It comes in a black or brushed-metal finish, and is designed to sit comfortably alongside (or on top of) standard-width stereo components, connecting with digital, optical or phono leads.
The Symphony's slot-loading CD-R drive can play audio CDs directly, rip their contents to the Symphonyís 80GB internal hard disk and burn new audio CDs from locally stored music. You can sort through your Symphony-based music by artist, album, song or genre, use playlists or even filter for music using ìSearchlistsî, which gather tracks using your own search-style filters. You can switch the focus from its internal music vault to any shared iTunes library on the network, and the Symphony even shares its own music collection on the network as an iTunes shared library. Finally, connect an iPod to its USB port to play your music on either device.
It has a four-port Ethernet hub and a wireless network antenna built into the back. The wireless hardware can connect to existing AirPort networks as a client or act as a complete network base station itself. You could use a Symphony as the central point for your music and play multiple audio streams from it to up to five other devices simultaneously.
The interface is a dual-wheel affair: an inner dial scrolls up and down, and the outer jog-style ring steps left and right through the column-like lists. We found it simple to master and well-suited to the task, and the remote control was just as easy to use.
This is the most flexible, most capable audio streaming product we have tested, offering an excellent blend of hi-tech and hi-fi features. The internal storage makes your music fully accessible even if your Mac isn't running. The optical drive rips tracks to the format and quality of your choice and burns copies back to audio CD format, and sharing is a real two-way street.
THE FINAL ANALYSIS
Every one of these products has something going for it, but most have some kind of drawback a well. We expected Apple's AirPort Express with AirTunes to be an automatic candidate for our top recommendation, but it proved to be quite limiting. MacSense's HomePod MP-100 also failed to impress, although its Internet radio feature was appreciated. The Wurlitzer Digital Jukebox is a great-sounding total solution but, at around $4000, totally unrealistic for just about anyone. This brings us to the final three products, the ones that deserve real consideration. For full-scale video streaming to TV, the Elgato EyeHome is the only game in town. Add the EyeTV to the mix and you get full PVR (personal video recorder) abilities right in your Mac. However, taking over your TV to play music can be a problem even if you do have a decent cinema speaker setup. Our preferred streaming solution proved to be a OliveÆ Symphony as the new centre of our digital music library, with a Roku SoundBridge M1000 or two in other parts of the house for driving satellite sound systems from the Symphony 's shared music library.
https://www.olive.us/p_images/main/symphony.gif
