Store all your audio CDs on an Olive hi-fi music server. Buy an Olive 4 or Olive 4 HD by Thursday, December 31st and get the remarkable, remastered Beatles 17-Disc collection FREE! This is the Beatles Collection you’ve been waiting for. Every song in the Beatles catalog, every album from Please Please Me to Let it Be remastered to today’s highest standards. A $200 value – it’s yours FREE with your purchase of an Olive 4. To take advantage of this deal, use this link.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Is everything to be advertised by mindlessly replicating the seller’s sales pitch ?
Here’s what I found about the Olive….
sYgnal – December 20th, 2009 at 8:38 am GMT+5
A checklist of all that is wrong with the OLIVE:
-You’d have to be a PICKLE (a drunk) to buy one.
-Offering 24Bit/192Khz oversampling won’t change the sound quality of the CDs being ripped especially when you don’t offer the playback capabilities of certain formats that would take advantage of that sampling rate!
-No Blu Ray Video/Audio playback.
-No SACD / DVD-A ripping & playback.
-No DTS CD ripping & playback.
-Who the hell uses stereo RCA connectors – Try 6 so we could play SACD / DVD-A
-If it was made in the US why does it use Japanese parts: CD Drive, Harddrive (TEAC anyone??)
-No Preamp
-No Speakers.
At least, BOSE offers the speaker set with their sardine can when they are ripping you off – All OLIVE does is give a remastered Beatles box-set for screwing ya!
Harold,
I work with Olive, and having responded to the original post to which you refer (on TechCrunch), it seems only fitting to respond here, as well.
The sentiment that 24 bit/192 kHz sound won’t improve standard CDs is absolutely correct, but that’s not why we’ve embraced it. Twenty-four-bit sound is the golden standard used by top-line recording engineers, and the ability to reproduce it is paramount for audiophiles.
The question then becomes, how to acquire music that meets this standard. You bring up SACD and DVD-A, two formats that never caught on with the buying public. Similarly, Blu-ray as an audio delivery device is far from established; it makes no sense to integrate features that will drive up the price of the unit but will remain unused by the vast majority of people who buy our product.
(On the other side of the argument, more than 95 percent of people in our price range and below utilize RCA connectors. Balanced connectors are usually available only at a much higher price point.)
Olive sees the future of audiophile-grade music delivery coming in the form of USB drives (at least until the Internet is able to efficiently handle downloads of files that size). Look no further than the 24-bit Beatles remaster for an example. There’s a reason that those records were not released on SACD or any of the other formats you listed. The USB option offers wild amounts of storage and high-quality data transfer.
The Olive 4 and Olive 4HD both feature USB ports; right now they allow users to add additional storage capacity or backup drives; in the future they’ll be used to upload music.
As for your comment about amplification and speakers: Olive makes music servers. It’s what we do, and we think we do it exceedingly well. You wouldn’t expect your CD player (or even your SACD player) to have its own amplification or speaker solution; Olive is no different. (That said, both topics have been hot conversation items around here for some time. Don’t be surprised to see action on either or both fronts at some point in the future.)
Hi Jason,
I appreciate the fact that you read comments and admit that upgrades are on the way!
Thanks for clarifying the choice of options but my comment was mainly directed at “The gadgeteer” which has in the past also endorsed other products by simply re-printing the manufacturer’s adds without any critical examination. Onesuch product was the “Snappy” camera which grossly distorted images both with barreled perspectives and low resolution distorted colors.
Harold