Squeezing an Olive: fact finding mission on Olive music serv

woodsyi · « **on:** 19 May 2006, 12:57 pm »

It looks like Olive music server is becoming the latest darling of AC. As an owner of the "has been" Squeezebox 2, I would like to learn about the features of a Symphony (it must be the best deal for consumers since dealers are whining about having no margin for profit) Musica and Opus. Should I ditch the old and get with the new?

I would like to find out more details please: what specific DAC(s), storage capacity and expandability, ripping features, wireless capability, etc. and ultimately the sound of both stock and modified units. I also would like to assess whether it duplicates much of what a home computer does already or not since I have to have a PC anyway for work at home. I will go first with what I know.

SB3, $300; Symphony(old) $900

Wireless streaming: SB yes; Olive no
Built in (much easier) ripper: SB no; Olive yes
Built in recorder of analog source, i.e. vinyl record: SB no; Olive yes
Storage capacity: SB unlimited; Olive 1 USB drive (can this be daisy chained?)

Those of you with Olive units please chime in with more facts about the unit. I want to know more.

I am eager to lean more.

Vinnie R. · « **Reply #1 on:** 19 May 2006, 01:13 pm »

Quote from: woodsyi

Wireless streaming: SB yes; Olive no

Storage capacity: SB unlimited; Olive 1 USB drive (can this be daisy chained?) ...

Hi Woodsyi,

Not true...

Wireless streaming: SB yes; Olive YES

Storage capacity: Olive has 2 USB ports plus can wireless stream music from your computer, so if you say SB is unlimited, then so is Olive

I recommend you take a look here:

http://www.olive.us/downloads/manual_symphony_musica.pdf

You'll be able to learn a lot just by reading that .pdf

You can also learn a lot about their three players here: www.olive.us. Thes post features, specs, etc...

I've owned the Symphony since late 2005 and have been chatting about it and planning mods for it months ago. Check out these threads on my circle:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=26817

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=27667&start=0

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=28097&start=0

RWA Olive mod info: http://www.redwineaudio.com/Olive.html

The Opus is next and hasn't even shipped to customer's yet...

You'll find a lot of answers to your questions, and even some things that Olive is still working on (e.g. control via a wireless PDA).

After you've spent your morning catching up, then you can ask more questions

Best regards,

woodsyi · « **Reply #2 on:** 19 May 2006, 01:30 pm »

Thanks for chiming in Vinnie. Looks like I have to do some reading.

Are you allowed to divulge information on specific parts inside Olive unit? If I want mod I would like to know why what part is being changed and so forth. I also read somewhere that wireless streaming is not great with the Olive unit -- there will be drops. Is this true or not? I am hoping this thread will serve as a fact reservoir for those who are trying to decide whether to get SB or Olive. I am not trying to disparage any one particular product.

Occam · « **Reply #3 on:** 19 May 2006, 01:35 pm »

Vinnie,

Would you give some comparisons between the Dac circuitry on the SB and the Symphony? I believe the SB uses a PCM1748 followed by a NJM2401 (which your mods substantially upgrade as well as other improvements). Could you provide the same info for the Symphony?

The same info for the OPUS, when available, would be most appreciated. Are those BB differential output DACs current or voltage output? (if you don't know the specific model). Also, any details on the post DAC chip circuitry, topology, components, etc....

And for those of us with external DACs, what are your views on the quality of the SPDIF outputs for the SB and the different Olive models?

TIA,
Paul

woodsyi · « **Reply #4 on:** 19 May 2006, 01:43 pm »

Quote from: Occam

Vinnie,

Would you give some comparisons between the Dac circuitry on the SB and the Symphony? I believe the SB uses a PCM1748 followed by a NJM2401 (which your mods substantially upgrade as well as other improvements). Could you provide the same info for the Symphony?

The same info for the OPUS, when available, would be most appreciated. Are those BB differential output DACs current or voltage output? (if you don't know the specific model). Also, any details on the post DAC chip circuitry, topology, c ...

What he said!

That is what I wanted to ask but I didn't (still don't) know how to ask.

Jampot · « **Reply #5 on:** 19 May 2006, 01:55 pm »

A rhetorical question -

How long before someone has a work round for the Olive and SB3 to talk together?

I don't see them being mutually exclusive unless you only play music in one place in the home.

Personally, I love the idea of 'recording' vinyl with (relative) ease.

Exciting, isn't it?

Jim

sts9fan · « **Reply #6 on:** 19 May 2006, 02:18 pm »

I think a major selling point of the SB is that for 300 bucks you can have another one in another room with the same database.

Vinnie R. · « **Reply #7 on:** 19 May 2006, 02:25 pm »

Hi Woodsyi,

Quote from: Woodsyi

Are you allowed to divulge information on specific parts inside Olive unit?

Nothing is top secret if one can open the cover and take a look at the parts and model numbers (which will void the Olive warranty as you probably know). Anything that I can find in their is fair to be talked about.

BTW, Olive is well aware that I am modding their units. I've asked permission from Oliver (the President) back when I bought mine in 2005. I am happy to be a reseller for them so my customers can buy them directly from me with mods if they want.

Quote from: Woodsyi

I also read somewhere that wireless streaming is not great with the Olive unit -- there will be drops. Is this true or not? I am hoping this thread will serve as a fact reservoir for those who are trying to decide whether to get SB or Olive. I am not trying to disparage any one particular product.

This has not been the case for me streaming my .flac files from my computer. No drop-outs. Just like the wireless squeezeboxes, there are going to be those with wireless problems with their network that they need to address.

All my .flac files were already on an external 300GB USB hard drive (back when I was using it with my SB2/SB3). Now, I just plug that drive into one of the USB ports on the Olive and it sees all the music and plays off the the external hard drive....seems very smooth and seemless so far!

Quote from: Occam

Would you give some comparisons between the Dac circuitry on the SB and the Symphony? I believe the SB uses a PCM1748 followed by a NJM2401 (which your mods substantially upgrade as well as other improvements). Could you provide the same info for the Symphony?

Hi Paul,

Think of the Symphony and Musica as identical units except for the hard drive (the Symphony uses a 2.5" laptop drive at 80GB, and the Musica uses a 3.5" drive that is being offered at 160GB and 250GB versions). The power supply sections are the same and the motherboards are the same, except for the hard drive connector soldered to the board. The Symphony's hard drive only runs of 5V and is more power efficient. The Musica's hard drive runs on both 5V and 12V...

The only other difference that I can tell between the Symphony and Musica is that the Musica's RCA jacks are gold plated, but are still the same PCB mount style....kind of like the stock squeezebox.

The dac of the stock Symphony/Musica is built into the Analog Devices "SoundMAX" CODEC. The analog ouput appears to go through three opamp stages (using Burr Brown 2134s). The spdif out goes to the optical Xmitter and to a 75-ohm Pulse Transformer. I haven't done a spec-by-spec comparison of this to the SB's 1748, but in terms of the stock analog and digital output sound quality, I prefer the stock Olive to the stock SB2/SB3. The same holds true after mods. I went into some detail about this in one of the threads on my forum that I linked to above.

I can not yet comment on the details of the Opus, except for the following:

They still haven't shipped them and I am waiting to get one to listen to and do lots of snooping around inside

. The 400GB version's MSRP is $2999.00, and the 500GB version's MSRP is $3499.00. I do know that it was designed by Olive in the USA and is not a Hifidelio product made in Germany (which is what the Symphony and Musica are...just in English and with a toroid power supply with 120Vac, 60hz input).

Here is the link for the Opus:
http://www.olive.us/p_bin/?cid=01_07_opus

You can click on the specs page for more details. I heard from a little birdie that the dac of the Opus is the Burr Brown PCM 1798 but I have not confirmed this, and I'm not sure about the opamps used or what the special clock is all about that is supposed to mimize jitter.

Quote from: Jampot

How long before someone has a work round for the Olive and SB3 to talk together?

Now you're talkin', Jampot! I can see this happening, but I'm sure Olive prefers that you use their Sonata instead:
http://www.olive.us/p_bin/?cid=01_02_sonata

I have not tried one yet....

I hope all this info helps,

Vinnie R. · « **Reply #8 on:** 19 May 2006, 02:27 pm »

Quote from: sts9fan

I think a major selling point of the SB is that for 300 bucks you can have another one in another room with the same database.

Hi sts9fan,

That is what the Olive Sonata is supposed to do, for $199:

http://www.olive.us/p_bin/?cid=01_02_sonata

I pretty sure that you need to buy one of the Olive Music Servers to use it, which makes the SB more attractive cost-wise.

Best,

woodsyi · « **Reply #9 on:** 19 May 2006, 03:03 pm »

Vinnie,

If storage capacity is the only difference between the higher priced new version and the lower price "old" stock, Musica and Symphony models are similar except storage capacity, and you can plug any USB external storage device to augment the stock HD, it seems to be a no brainer to get the "old" stock Symphony while they last and mod it. What am I missing here?

Vinnie R. · « **Reply #10 on:** 19 May 2006, 03:15 pm »

Quote from: woodsyi

Vinnie,

If storage capacity is the only difference between the higher priced new version and the lower price "old" stock, Musica and Symphony models are similar except storage capacity, and you can plug any USB external storage device to augment the stock HD, it seems to be a no brainer to get the "old" stock Symphony while they last and mod it. What am I missing here?

Hi Woodsyi,

I have to agree with you in terms of "best bang for the buck."

For those who don't want to use an external drive, the larger hard drive offering of both Musica versions might be attractive....but come at a price.

Papajin · « **Reply #11 on:** 19 May 2006, 03:27 pm »

Is there any way to directly access the hard drive in any of these machines? Specifically could I copy a bunch of stuff from an existing pc to it's internal drive?

How is the display on this thing? It looked a little on the small side from the pics I saw. Just wondering how hard it is to see from 10-15 feet away.

Robert57 · « **Reply #12 on:** 19 May 2006, 03:51 pm »

This is a very helpful thread. I'm also wondering how a couple of SB's might coexist with an Olive on the same wireless network. So I'll toss out a few more questions, which I hope haven't been fully answered elsewhere.

1. Can the Olive access preexisting FLAC (and soon Apple Lossless) files from a central networked hard drive (or NAS RAID, like an Infrant ReadyNAS)? I would want the convenience and security having a robust central storage drive for multiple SB's and perhaps an Olive operating on one wireless and wired ethernet network.

2. As the Olive rips, can it save a back-up to a central networked RAID hard drive (NAS) or server, so a networked SB could access the same file from its Slimerver database? It would be cool if the Olive and SB could share from the same library. I would ideally want to use iTunes on a Mac Mini as my main library organizing software for creating playlists, for both the Olive and the SB's.

3. Vinnie, could you elaborate some more on the differences beteen the BB DAC's, and why there would be a difference in the sound quality between the SB and Olive, even after mods? Might this be a function of greater room inside the Olive case for better caps and other analog stage parts?

4. If one were to rip CD's on the Olive, how confident would one be of the error correction? Is there any info. on how this might compare with iTunes, or EAC? And if the Olive's built-in song database of track info does not include an obscure CD, how would one get it? Is cover art available, or could it be added later from an outside source to the Olive database?

5. If the Olive hard drive were to fail, would one be able to replace it and recover the operating system after the warranty ( which I believe is one year)? It seems like a closed system, and not easily repaired with off-the-shelf drives and parts. I imagine there is no way to boot the Olive from an external drive?

6. The Olive display is tiny and seems very hard to read from across the room. And there is no video out to a monitor/TV, I believe. So how does one easily see tracks and select playlists, without having a PDA ?

7. Is the Olive totally quiet as its drives are spinning? Could one hear them from a few feet away?

8. I see that Olive's President claims in an interview they aim to be "open source", but will there be a community of plug-in and software geeks to support this if Olive fails? How would the song track database be updated if Olive ceased to exist? It is very comforting to me to know of the Slim forum and the large network of programmers that stand ready to adapt and support the SB as standards change and add new options.

Some of these questions I expect we wouldn't be able to fully answer until more people are using these devices, possibly side by side on the same wireless network.

Thanks.

Rob

brj · « **Reply #13 on:** 19 May 2006, 04:01 pm »

Quote from: woodsyi

What am I missing here?

In my view, the ability to backup your music is the most significant missing feature.

All of the Olive products run a version of Linux on a 32 bit PowerPC processor, but they have not opened up access to their operating system. I've been told, however, that you can telnet into the unit over the Ethernet connection. (I wonder if they are using Yellow Dog Linux, or one of the PowerPC ports of the more common Linux distributions.) As a result, there is no way that I know of to run backup software on the unit itself. If you decide to attach an external USB drive, you could conceivably back this up manually by connecting it to another computer with backup software and mirroring it, but this a wee bit inconvenient.

The other item I have yet to see documented is how they rip the music from CDs. As far as I know, EAC running in secure mode on Windows is still the only means to guarantee a bit perfect rip. On Linux, the best bet is cdparanoia, which attempts to rip music in a repetitive, error correcting manner similar to EAC on Windows. I don't remember the reference offhand, but I seem to recall that there are situations in which cdparanoia can not guarantee a perfect rip - although this may depend on the type of CD ROM drive you are using.

That said, I think Olive is a great product technically. (I have been interested in their offerings for a long time, and actually made the first AC post regarding Olive.) I think they just need to address the mounting of network filesystems and network backups, and release a little more information on their software implementation.

Other than that, my only other caution is that Olive needs to watch their prices a bit. They have a wonderful, elegant, one-box solution on their hands, but as you cross the line from the audio world to the computing world, competition gets even more fierce. A $500 Mac Mini running Front Row (or similarly priced Windows Media Center based computer) provides more flexibility and leaves you lots of money left over for your favorite USB->I2S external DAC. Heck, you could even run the Mac Mini off of battery power if you wanted to!

tvad4 · « **Reply #14 on:** 19 May 2006, 04:09 pm »

brj makes a good point about the Olive's pricing. I don't know if the Olive units are priced correctly, and it'll be up to the market to decide. However, I do believe the Olive's one-box solution, ease of set-up, and mutli-use platform commands a price premium over other less elegant hard drive based playback systems.

...speaking as someone who doesn't want to fuss with computer audio, but simply wants to use it.

Vinnie R. · « **Reply #15 on:** 19 May 2006, 04:17 pm »

Quote from: Robert57

So I'll toss out a few more questions, which I hope haven't been fully answered elsewhere.
...

Hi Robert,

I'll try my best to help get answers to your questions. I'll be posting again soon enough.

In the meantime, it would be very helpful if the others who are now getting into selling and modding Olives can contribute to this thread. I've been posts on audiocircle from two other resellers who seem to speak highly of the Olives, so I hope they can also add their impressions of the stock unit and make some effort to research the answers to the questions
posted in this very helpful information-gathering thread.

I've been doing A LOT of research here and you'll find a handful of posts on my forum (liked to at the beginning of this thread) but I have many things that need to get done during the day so I will try my best to contribute more later in the day and the weekend...

Thanks for understanding. These are exciting times!

woodsyi · « **Reply #16 on:** 19 May 2006, 04:33 pm »

Thanks Vinnie for all the information so far. I am a firm believer that audio karma rewards those who are helpful.

It is an exciting time in the digital realm and you are right in the middle of it. I understand it is a business and I appreciate your time and information. I hope your efforts here rewards you.

Vinnie R. · « **Reply #17 on:** 19 May 2006, 04:51 pm »

Quote from: woodsyi

Thanks Vinnie for all the information so far. I am a firm believer that audio karma rewards those who are helpful. It is an exciting time in the digital realm and you are right in the middle of it. I understand it is a business and I appreciate your time and information. I hope your efforts here rewards you.

Hi Woodsyi,

Thanks! I like the audio karma comment and being helpful was rewarding for the squeezeboxes, so I see no reason why it won't be here.

Yes, this is a business, but I hope people also understand that it is more than just business for me. It is definitely a passion and I think those who have been following my forum (and my posts that will continue here) regarding these new Olives can see that. There will also be those who are less interested in all of that and who are all business. They wil be looking to sell units and talk them up, but not contribute to these threads. That is the point I was trying to make above...

I fell in love with my Symphony a while back. Some of my customers who have spoken or emailed me back in late 2005 and in early 2006 when I started developing mods know this. I also really liked the idea of modding the Olive because I would be offering mods on something *different* ....and not just jumping in on the bandwagon.

Heck...there are other similar units to the Olive out there, such as the Cambridge Audio: http://www.audioadvisor.com/store/productdetail.asp?sku=CAMB640HB&product_name=640H%20Music%20Server

Thanks for your kind words, Woodsyi. I'll be back later..

Cheers!

sts9fan · « **Reply #18 on:** 19 May 2006, 05:22 pm »

Quote

I also really liked the idea of modding the Olive because I would be offering mods on something *different* ....and not just jumping in on the bandwagon

There's a bandwagon in audio mods?

woodsyi · « **Reply #19 on:** 19 May 2006, 05:31 pm »

Quote from: sts9fan

There's a bandwagon in audio mods?

Only on WMP on SOSH!