Olive 4HD HiFi Music Server - my review

Checking the LINN website was a real eye opener for me, too. The Majik , Akurate and Precisiosn models are what they want to sell basically to Hi End buffs with serious multi xx k set-ups, that Sneaky is a kind of mobile device that you use for your kitchen bibliothek or bedroom, patio, whatever medium sized room. Via WiFi or that LINN KENT system you get all the data from the big streaming DS units. All you gotta add is one of those LINN Kompendum speakers and you can enjoy quality sound. The Snealky features a 20 wpc Stereo amp, that actually sounds sweet from what I heard so far, esp, with the Kompendum this is a serious music system.
What is interesting for me is that the DAC's and streaming units inside are basicallly the same cores. So if you use the Sneaky DS with or without the inbuilt amp it will work as a very capable stand alone streamer with my Stereo set up. Plus the option to carry it anywhere I want and just hook it up with a set of speakers,
The Sneaky DS might even work with an OLIVE 4 or any other streaming unit as an add on.

 

I just attempted to backup my 2 TB drive in the Olive 4HD using a WesternDigital MyBook Elite 2 TB USB backup drive. I found out that the Olive will only back up to a drive formatted with the FAT32 file system, where this drive can only be formatted using NTFS format.

I'm going to try a Dane Electric backup drive which supports FAT32. I'll report the results of the backup later.

 

After spending the summer with my Olive 4HD, I thought I'd share a few updates. I have about 1,800 discs ripped to loss-less FLAC. I've used only about 40% of the 2 TB capacity, so there is lots of room for more new music. I have another 500 or so that I put in storage which need to be ripped, which should leave me with about 50% capacity.

As I mentioned before, you need a FAT32 formatted USB hard drive to perform backups. My Dane Electric drive works just fine, but the backup takes forever - roughly 48 hours for the ~800 GB I've used so far. At least I'm ready for a hard drive failure now and should never have to rip all of these discs again.

I had 1 problem CD (Chris Smither - Up on the Lowdown) which frustratingly got stuck in the CD transport. After calling Olive support and trying a few of their suggestions, I had to send the unit to them. They got the disc out unharmed and sent everything back very promptly for the cost of shipping the unit to them. I was told that my Smither disc would not play on any Olive 4 player, but I could import the music to the Olive over the network. It really sucked having to send the unit from the east to west coast and back again to remove a stuck disc. This was the only disc to have this problem.

I continue to be impressed with the sound of this player. I had some Grover cables on there, and swapped a pair of Audioquest Niagara cables in place of the Grovers which added a measure of both increased detail and smoothness. The Marantz SA7 still sounds noticably superior, most noticably more bass and lower midrange body and better sounding overall. The Olive 4HD sound is hard to tell from my RAM modded Denon 3910, and a toss-up quality wise on CDs. I see RAM offers clock, power supply, and output stage mods for the Olive 4HD, but I don't feel any need to do so, but one has to wonder the ultimate potential of the unit.

Olive has provided updates to the software which make the internet radio much better than before with regard to the stations in Olive's database and the accuracy of the metadata. They improved the default sorting of the Olive to sort alphabetically within Artist. I still wish I could sort by release year / artist / album.

The iPod touch is slow and frustrating when using the "Search" mode. When in Search mode, each key you type in the search field immediately travels to the access point/router and then to the Olive, and then returns over the same 2 hops back to the iPod Touch. The result is an unresponsive Search interface, which narrows the results after each keystroke at a severe performance penalty. I'd prefer if the search would not send each individual keystroke, but process the search only when I press the "Search" button. Perhaps if I had an extra router in the room wired to the Olive it would be something like 50% more responsive - not sure...

I'm still very happy with this as an all in one solution, and am seriously considering an Olive 2 for streaming to my family room and patio.

 

Nice follow up review, and thanks for the updates. The Marantz SA7 must be once nice player to be significantly superior to redbook on the Olive

 

Thought I'd share experiences with the "Import" feature of the Olive 4. You just map a drive to the Olive's "Import" folder. From there, you just select and copy files (up to 24bit/192khz resolution) to the Import folder. The Olive detects when files are copied to that drive and automatically imports the files into the music library. It also determines if any metadata is present, and updates the information in its own database. When the import is complete, the files in the "import" folder are automatically deleted. The import feature is really pretty slick, and works great. If you already have a lot of files downloaded to a PC/server, this feature greatly streamlines the load process and completes loads in significantly less time (over wireless) compared to ripping CDs. Hard-wired connections would be exponentially faster.

I still haven't hooked up a TV monitor via the HDMI and will be trying that next.

 

I have owned an Olive 4 (ITB) since April 09 and the 2 excellent reviews, including followup info, from SamS & McGruder on this thread echo my general feelings about the product.

My observations as follows -

1) I love it and have burnt 1200 discs so far to flac, of those 1200 I have had about 20 that either are not recognised or spin endlessly in the player until I press eject or one time turned the player off and did a hard disc reboot. This would appear to be a design issue with the chosen drive as I had mine changed over after 6 months as I had endless trouble with the touchscreen.

2) The sound quality is excellent. My player does not have the newer higher specced DAC's that the are in the HD, but nonetheless it performs superbly and the sound quality is excellent. I have never had to reimport a CD because of droputs, glitches etc. that I have had to do with PC & Mac systems previously.

3) The touchscreen is clumsy and I usually only use it for the scrolling Album Play feature. it is often unresponsive and frustratingly hard to navigate.

4) Every software update (across the ethernet connection) has improved the usability of the player in some way, whether making the search functions more reliable , fixing a digital volume glitch that affected earlier software, improving the Maestro software or allowing me to import music easily via my MAC's.

5) The Maestro software is however clunky and slow as others have already noted. It is very frustrating to load album art or to change metadata even when I usually do it wired not wireless. By the way McGruder thanks for the Album Art Exchange link it is an excellent resource.

6) The latest Iphone update for Maestro is a big improvement in usability compared with its previous incarnation.

To summarise all in all this is a company that appear intent on continually improving the experience for those of us who have purchased the unit. Overall I am very happy with it, particular as I dont have to handle the CD covers, particularly the mini LP type more than once to listen to them on a continuous basis.

Now how do I justify purchasing the HD?!

 

Thank you for the review.

 

AccurateRIP is about bit perfect ripping, not filling the track info.

 

Hi McGruder,

I am keen to see what you think of the video via HDMI and how good it is, it may sway me to go for the HD as I can restore the 4's existing music database from the external drive I have rather than have to reimport them all.

 

Thanks for the heads up in the IPhone Maestro update. Hopefully it runs faster, I have not yet tried to implement a wired connection or improve the position of my router to improve the wireless signal. Still haven't tested the HDMI output on any TV monitors either.

I have no idea how much the HD actually improves upon the sound. You might also consider a good external DAC, or RAM (Reference Audio Mods) modifications if you are interested in taking the sound to improved levels.

 

Hi Ken,

I have thought about a DAC a few times, but as a reformed audiophile ie not as obsessive as I was, I want to wait a bit and just enjoy the simplicity of the system as it is.

 

Hi Ken,

I couldn't help myself so I have dipped my feet into DAC water again with the little Project DAC Box USB which I will only use on the S/PDIF input from the Olive so that I can play 24bit/96Khz WAV & FLAC downloads like the George Harrison and Paul Mac re releases. The Olive 4 only has standard 44khz output on the analogues stages.

 

Previously I'd written about some of the shortcomings of the IPhone/Touch/iPad Maestro application that was provided as a solution to remote control the Olive music servers. It may be found in the ITunes store by searching on "Olive App". I'm happy to say that the latest software update from 12/29/10 was a huge step forward in usability and performance.

Previously I'd written about performance issues, particularly with the most important "Search" function, which previously would invoke a "search" operation across the network following each keystroke in the search text field.

As I had hoped, the application was modified to allow the user to type in the complete search text and explicitly press a "Search" button to trigger the search transaction across the network.

The new application caches artists, songs, and titles, further reducing unnecessary trips across the network, along with the data retrieval operations performed within the Olive server, and processed locally in the iPhone/Touch/iPad device.

There is also a scrollable "first letter" index that allows you to scroll down the artist listing by selecting the letter on the right side of the display. It works nicely by sliding your finger along the letters, and is very quick and responsive in taking you to the selected part of the catalog.

There is also excellent support for the internet radio stations now, which allow for filtering listings within genres and streaming bit rates.

As a software application systems architect and as an Olive user, I really appreciate these no-nonsense type of application design changes for usability and performance. I think they did what they needed to do to create a truly slick and responsive interface for navigating my 2,000+ titles without any sense of frustration, and have essentially made wireless vs wired network connection a non-issue.

At this point, I'd like to see album artwork browsing sorted by album name, artist, etc. I've always though it would also be really cool to provide listings by the year of release also. Nice job Olive, I look forward to more capabilities in the future.

 

I also wanted to report that I have tested the HDMI output to a 42" LCD television. Most of the bitmaps I've catalogued are 600x600 pixels. These look great on the Olive touch screen, and the Touch device. On my television, the display fills the screen correctly and to scale, and makes good use of the wide screen aspect ratios. I consider the display of the artwork to be "OK", that is, you can definitely identify a fair amount of detail in the image but, as expected, the image does not look "high definition" or resolved. I imagine that it would look more "high definition" on a display with less pixels, such as a 25" screen. Perhaps I'll upload some images next time I set the Olive 4HD up with my multichannel system to do justice to my description.

 

Why do you believe this to be true? The Olive website states WAV, FLAC, MP3 and AAC are supported with sampling rates from 11,000 to 96,000 Hz.

 

Just to clear confusion from the earlier post which stated the olive cannot play 24 bit/96 KHz files: I transferred George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass", 24/96Khz download to my Olive. It correctly identifies these files as 24/96KHz wav files, and plays them just fine through the analog outputs.