I bought the O3HD shortly after it came out and am very pleased with it. I had researched it well enough and new the plus and minus points and to be honest, for me there were few minuses because most of what is omitted, by comparison with the O4HD, I didn't need. It might have been good to have an optical out but my main concern was being unsure about how good the overall sound qaulity would be and that is where the 30 day money back guarantee was so important.
When I first loaded a few CDs onto the HDD and listened there was a marked difference over the sound from my Yamaha CDP. Undoubtedly there was more detail with the Olive but the sound was too thin. That changed with use and it is now an excellent foot tapping experience every time.
The Maestro software is easy to use, albeit a little slow occasionally but the Metadata can throw up some odd resullts at times, mostly with the album artwork. Having loaded 350 CDs so far, I have only had one refusal but the back up solution is to load discs onto the Olive from Windows Media Player or similar via a PC or laptop.using the netwrok connection. The Olive takes twice as long to load a CD via it's Teac CDR drive (6 mins) than my PC does with Media Player, but I am loading the CDs in WAV rather than the recommended FLAC and I do not know if FLAC loads quicker.
The negatives for me are the fairly rare but still irritating load errors; press "import" on the touchscreen and the CD ejects or begins playing instead. The iPod app is quite good but there is no cover art and it needs a little refining in my opinion. Hopefully a software/firmware upgrade in the future will sort these things out. To be honest, on reflection it is much easier and much better to control it all via the laptop and the idea of a small netbook for the purpose is becoming quite appealing. The HDD back-up process is very time consuming and I think my number of CDs are now at the 9 hours back-up time mark and you will need a hard drive that is formatted in FAT 32, which turned out to be a bit of a pain for the hard drives I had to hand.
One of the things that swung this purchase for me was the prospect of my wife accessing all of our music easily and simply and this machine has been wholeheartedly endorsed on that front. I think it is well worth considering if it offers the solutions you are looking for.