What We Think

An intelligently designed, easy-to-use music server that puts sound quality first.

Over the years, there’s been an Apricot (a brand of computers), an Orange Micro (PC add-ins), and today’s ubiquitous Blackberry — all presumably homages to the fruity but inspired naming of Apple Computer. Now comes Olive (it’s technically a fruit), a new California company with European roots. Olive’s Symphony Wireless Music Center combines broad music-server functionality with Wi-Fi networking and is designed and priced for the do-it-yourselfer as much as the custom installer.

In one sense the Symphony is really just a high-quality CD player with benefits — lots of them. Its slick, slot-loading drive plays CDs or rips and stores them on its 80-gigabyte (GB) internal hard drive in a choice of formats from lossless FLAC to highly compressed MP3 (Olive will rip your CDs for you — for a fee — if you’re too busy). Symphony can also burn audio CDs with music stored on the hard drive. Finally, Symphony can distribute its content to your home network via standard Ethernet cabling or wirelessly using its built-in 802.11g Wi-Fi capability. It can stream to as many as five remote rooms at once depending on the encoding format and bit rate of the music. Each room must be equipped with a compatible Ethernet or Wi-Fi “client” — such as Olive’s soon to be released PDA-sized Sonata ($199) — that will allow you to select music from Symphony and route it to a local music system. Symphony’s line outputs are volume-controllable via its supplied remote, so for a stereo setup all you really need are a power amp and speakers (or a pair of self-powered speakers).

Symphony can integrate with Apple’s iTunes music-library software on Macs or PCs and is accompanied by Olive’s proprietary Playlist software for Macs only (requires OS X 10.4 or higher). Playlist lets you add, edit, and display extensive composer, title, performer, and other information on classical or other music selections (key info appears on Symphony’s LCD during play), and its built-in Web browser lets you view music-dictionary entries and other relevant Web sites in real time.

SETUP Rear-panel connections include analog stereo audio outputs and inputs (Symphony can also rip from a line-level analog source), optical and coaxial digital outs, and a quartet of RJ-45 Ethernet jacks for wired connections to your home network or directly to Sonata clients or other Symphony servers — no computer-based home network required. There’s a small plug for the supplied Wi-Fi antenna and a pair of USB jacks, which directly accept an MP3 player on the off chance you don’t have a computer.

Symphony found my wireless home network without a hitch and configured itself (same thing when I later tried a wired Ethernet connection). It showed my Mac’s iTunes music library in its LCD window, and I could browse the listings and select items in compatible formats for playback — except for songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store, which were blocked even though the Olive otherwise plays MPEG-4 and AAC files. You can drag and drop files from a Mac or PC onto the Olive’s hard drive, though not the reverse. Upon loading a new CD, Symphony queries the Gracenote database for track, title, and artist info, which dutifully comes up within a moment or two. Symphony’s RJ-45 ports even function as an Ethernet switch, so I was able to daisy-chain connection to my TiVo. (Symphony’s networking functions are extensively addressable via an “Expert Mode” — definitely not for the clueless!) I wanted to check out the Olive’s native sound quality, so I connected both its analog and digital audio outputs to my system.

PERFORMANCE Symphony’s audio performance was faultless. In sharp contrast to every other music server (and DVR) I’ve seen, thanks to its fanless design and tiny, laptop-type hard drive, Symphony is dead silent save for the occasional mouse-scratch of disk-access. It’s hard to exaggerate how important this quietness can be — especially for classical listeners.

Discs I ripped using FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), which claims to reduce data by about half without affecting sound quality, sounded identical to the originals. For example, I ripped the Reference Recordings CD of clarinetist Eddie Daniels and the Composers String Quartet playing clarinet quintets of Brahms and Weber. Listening alternately to the imported track and the original, I was completely at a loss to choose between them; even the pianissimo clarinet tones remained free of the telltale burbling and other distortions that “lossy” compression often imposes. This virtue was even audible on pop music — especially material with exposed acoustic piano. On one such piece, Ben Folds’s “Brick” from Whatever and Ever Amen, the piano sound managed to avoid the clangorous tinge that muddles many MP3 files.

Of course, importing music via Symphony’s MP3 modes — 128, 160, or 192 kilobits per second (kbps), or variable bit rate — imposed the sonic penalties of the bit rate used. That said, at its highest bit rates MP3 can still sound very close to the original with great space savings, although I wish Olive offered a 320-kbps option. You can also record uncompressed AIFF (CD-audio) and WAV files, at which rate the 80-GB hard drive will accommodate the equivalent of about 125 typical-length CDs. Using FLAC not quite doubles this capacity, while 192-kbps MP3 should fit well over 1,000 CDs worth of music.

Symphony will rip an entire CD from a single keypress, or you can configure it to do so automatically on loading each new disc. My 62-minute Mozart and Weber quintets took about 71/2 minutes to release the Olive’s disc drive, though the actual coding (to FLAC or MP3/192) took more than 30 minutes: a fairly leisurely pace compared with a typical computer. Accessing the online Gracenote database, Symphony found disc and track title and artist info for every “normal” CD I threw at it, including some pretty obscure ones, in under a minute. However, most of my contemporary classical recordings — some admittedly very obscure — stumped it. If you don’t have broadband access, Symphony includes a substantial subset of the database on its hard drive, and Olive will send quarterly CD-ROM updates in the mail.

EASE OF USE The “widescreen” LCD on Symphony’s front panel is handsome, sharp, and readable, and the graphic design and structure of the menu system will feel familiar to anyone who has used an iPod. Dual-concentric jog/shuttle wheels are used to access, scroll, and select. The supplied remote control has only a four-way cursor/enter key set for these functions.

I found using Symphony easy and pleasant; rarely did I have to consult the extensive manual. Assembling playlists, though requiring far more scrolling and keypressing than simply dragging ’n’ dropping, was clear and intuitive. And there are scads of other nifty features. For instance, during playback the inner control wheel becomes a true “scrub-wheel,” rapidly fast-forward/reversing through the track to your desired spot. Another: under the Play Mode menu you can engage one of three dynamic compression settings, including an Expert Mode that dials up pro parameters like attack time and dynamics-squeezing ratio. A third: Symphony can access Internet radio stations — with all the attendant joys of low-bit-rate/low-fi audio streams, el-weirdo programming, and intermittent lockups. (To be fair, I found several decent-sounding streams among the Olive’s Shoutcast-enabled smorgasbord.)

The Short Form

WWW.OLIVE.US / 877-296-5483 / $899 / 17.125 x 11.5 x 3.375 IN

Plus

•Excellent sound and incredibly quiet operation. •Superb music organization and access. •Legible LCD readout. •Elegant design.

Minus

•No video output/onscreen display. •Won’t import noncontiguous tracks.

Key Features

•Plays and rips CDs to 80-GB hard drive •Rips to FLAC, WAV, AIFF, and MP3 formats for 125- to 1,500-plus-disc capacity •Wireless or wired streaming of music to up to 5 zones; incorporates Wi-Fi access point; 4-port Ethernet switch for setup of multiple networked A/V components •Can burn audio CDs from hard drive •1-touch CD-copying/burning •Playlist/Searchlist (“smart”-playlist) creation, playback •Full-function supplied remote control includes volume-control/mute •Playlist data-editing software (Mac only)

Test Bench

CD playback was very good, with linearity essentially perfect and noise modulation as good as I’ve seen. Noise performance was about 3 dB inferior to the very best players, which is still very good. I checked my tests on a FLAC-imported version of our test CD and got essentially identical results — no surprise. Analog-domain record/play frequency response was nearly as good as CD play-only, as was distortion. Full lab results

And here’s a biggie: Like most servers or CD changers, Symphony lets you edit info on your recordings by scrolling through lists of characters via its jog/shuttle wheels — an extremely tedious task. But you can also just type your Symphony’s IP address (displayed on its Info page) into the Web browser of any computer on your home network, and you’ll get typing access to most of its editable fields — Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, Playlists. This will be a godsend to obsessive-collector types. For example, a disc whose ill-conceived table of contents yields an Artist listing of, say, “Barbara Hendricks,” which unhappily sorts under the “Bs,” can be instantly edited to “Hendricks, Barbara,” to sort where it should. Very cool.

On the other hand, I uncovered a couple of prominent gaps in Symphony’s operation. The biggest: no video output for an onscreen display. The upside is that you don’t need to turn on a TV to use Symphony. The downside is that the 3.75 x 1.5-inch LCD is your only window to its extensive menus and displays, many of which are critical to everyday operation. You can set a default to get a large-font display of the current track title, times, the progress bar, and scrolling album title during playback, and this was easy to read from across the room (absent bright light falling across the LCD). But for extensive programming, you really need to be standing next to Symphony itself.

You also can’t select noncontiguous tracks for importation. Sure, you can rip an entire CD and simply delete the songs you don’t want, which only takes a couple of keypresses. But for CDs from which you want to grab only two or three songs — and don’t we all own too many of those? — this is a big hassle. Olive says it’s working to correct this in a future software update — Symphony’s firmware is upgradable through its own Internet connection or via a Web-download burnt to CD from your PC or Mac.

BOTTOM LINE There’s even more to Olive’s Symphony, but I’ve run out of space. Suffice it to say, this is the most thoroughly implemented, intelligently designed music server I’ve encountered, and its value is unquestionable — if it had a video out and onscreen display, it’d be just about perfect. Any serious music listener/collector who wants to replace 200 to as many as 2,000 CDs with a single slim component must check it out.

TEST BENCH FOR WEB
Daniel Kumin

CD AUDIO PERFORMANCE
Output level (with -20-dBFS input at 1 kHz): 215 mV
Noise level (re -20-dBFS output): -72.2 dB
Excess noise (with/without sine tone)
16-bit: +3.85/+3.75 dB
quasi-20-bit: +20.8/+20.7 dB
Linearity error (at -90 dBFS): 0.1 dB
Noise modulation: <0.1 dB <br />Frequency response: 20 Hz to 20 kHz +0, -0.1 dB
Distortion at reference level: 0.03%

CD playback was very good, with linearity essentially perfect and noise modulation as good as I've seen. Noise performance was about 3 dB inferior to the very best players, which is still very good. I checked my tests on a FLAC-imported version of our test CD and got essentially identical results - no surprise. Analog-domain record/play frequency response was nearly as good as CD play-only, as was distortion.