New Olive??

cse

Well-known member
Mar 3, 2008
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Does anyone know anthing about the new cheaper Olive machine. Does it still have internet radio? Does it lose anything sonically over the more expensive former? Or is it just a smaller storage capacity?
 
Have a search for Olive 3HD there was a thread about here only a couple of days ago, should answer most of your questions and a few more besides...
 
Henley's room at the national hifi show didn't seem to have any new Olive on show (I might have miss it). Nice room btw, the new Roksan Speakers do sound rather nice for the price.
 
Thaiman:
Henley's room at the national hifi show didn't seem to have any new Olive on show (I might have miss it). Nice room btw, the new Roksan Speakers do sound rather nice for the price.

Which new Roksan speakers?
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cse:Does anyone know anthing about the new cheaper Olive machine. Does it still have internet radio? Does it lose anything sonically over the more expensive former? Or is it just a smaller storage capacity?

I'm curious why the olive appeals to you. Care to elaborate?
 
jaxwired:

cse:Does anyone know anthing about the new cheaper Olive machine. Does it still have internet radio? Does it lose anything sonically over the more expensive former? Or is it just a smaller storage capacity?

I'm curious why the olive appeals to you. Care to elaborate?

I'm dead sure the Olive appeals to many, including myself who think NASs and networks etc are too much trouble.

To answer cse, both Olives does support Internet Radio - but selected ones from Olive - see website. The cheaper Olive only has ethernet, not wi-fi.
 
Thaiman:
Henley's room at the national hifi show didn't seem to have any new Olive on show (I might have miss it). Nice room btw, the new Roksan Speakers do sound rather nice for the price.

It was definitely there, along with a prototype of the new 6HD. And the speakers were Audiovector 🙂
 
henley, please tell olive i might be interested in a model with 1Tb hdd and internet radio, and only digital out, with the ability to back up to an external hdd. and agree with manicm, doing without a nas or unwanted functions, all in a smart looking enclosure, with colour screen built in and ipod remote app, appeals to me. as long as it works well...
 
Craig M.:henley, please tell olive i might be interested in a model with 1Tb hdd and internet radio, and only digital out, with the ability to back up to an external hdd.

Ooo, a chebby moment.
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Olive 3 has now been out for a while.. sounds almost as good as the Olive 4. Henley recently confirmed a new Olive 6HD is due soon with a top mounted touch screen.
 
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.
 
cse:I'd be facinated to know what you think - let me know.

Didn't hear it yesterday. Went into the shop and they were fairly busy, and couldn't wait an hour as the family were doin' some Xmas shopping... I've made an appointment for next weekend.
 
Thanks for sharing your impressions, grumpyoldman. I recently bought the Olive 4HD and I am quite pleased with it. The sound is great and it is convenient to have everything in one machine.

I have run into some troubles when loading CD's, especially with CD's with a lot of tracks - you know those pranks by artists who will fill the CD with a large number of dummy tracks and then have a bonus at 69, 77 or 99. Hence I would be interested in how you load CD's through WMP through your computer. Can you elaborate a little bit on this?

Thanks.
 
Hi Reinoud. The Olive site has manuals for the O3 & O4 here: http://www.olivehifi.com/uk/contact/product/olive4olive2.html. Click on support and product information and you want the Maestro Guide for how to do all the editing via PC or Mac.

All you need to do is get the IP address of your Olive from the touchscreen menu ('Settings' then 'Network Settings' then 'Network Information'). On your PC, depress the Windows icon key and R and that opens the Run box. Type in the IP address/return and that will open a new window containing an "Import" folder. Double click that folder and then just drag any complete music files from your PC's music library into that folder. They should automatically transfer one by one onto the Olive and once the Import folder is empty, you can use Maestro to check the cover art etc and make any required edits.

I find the edit process a bit quirky and if you need to edit an album title or artist, it seems that the best way is to highlight the album in the Album Name section of Maestro and then select edit. That way you change the information for the whole CD and not just single tracks. You can approach the same task from other menus (Album Artwork for example) but you then seem to often end up changing the information on one track only.

Hope that is clear enough but the manual is easy to follow. I'd be interested to hear any tips you have picked up.

Good luck
 
Thanks Grumpyoldman. The Import folder works fine, that was just the part I missed. I had found out your other suggestions already. Quite frankly that is necessary as well, as there are a lot of CD's were the art work is wrong so you need to fix that in Maestro. I have about 200 CD's loaded, still some 1300 to go 🙂 Good to know how to deal with back-up, I can do that when I go on vacation ...
 

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