Oilve 4HD - Cautionary Tale

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Aug 10, 2019
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Hello

I would be interested to know what other users experiences have been, but after much intial excitement I have returned my Olive 4Hd for a refund. It got to the stage that I was dreading switching as I was waiting to see what crazy thing it would do next. Perhaps I was just unluckly, but for such a high end piece of Hi-Fi equipment I would expect it to work flawlessly. My specific experiences are listed below (and I was on the last version of the software).
Random behaviour 1: I wrote a CD to the Hard Dive, which it did fine and then I put it into Standby. However it refused to stay in Standby and come back on and go into a loop of playing Gavotte by John Williams and then start cycling between the menu options of “What do you want to do?”, “Rate Track”, “Play Mode”. If I tried to stop the track playing by holding down the play button, this did briefly stop the track playing but then it just started the above loop again. The only way to stop this cycle was to switch off the Olive.Random behaviour 2: Refusing to stay in Standby is a behaviour I have also seen on at least 6 previous occasions, and again the only way to resolve the problem is to switch it off. After it exhibits this behaviour rather than going to the menu screen it normally just stays on the “Olive, Time and Date” screen and to get to the menu screen you have to press the Screen and then the “back arrow” in the bottom left hand corner of the next screen to get to the menu screen.Random behaviour 3: I was playing a Cd and pressed the “next track” button on the remote and then the Olive got stuck in a loop of just continually going to the next track playing a few seconds of this track going onto the next track and doing the same again.On occasions the timing of playing back tracks seemed "off", difficult to describe but more noticeable on slower pieces when the music seem to distort slightly.
The Hard Drive, which is supposed to be insulated in 10 layers of noise insulation has got progressively noisy in the few Weeks I have had it and when on you can her the Hard Drive going “clunk, clunk”, clunk, clunk” then occasionally interrupted by a series of rapid disk access noises.The Olive takes an unacceptably long time to backup. I had around 800GB of data on it which took 33hrs(!) to backup. Others have reported very slow backup times.

General views is that the sound Quality is fantastic, but I would say it is very good and certainly no better than my Arcam CD73T CD player.

The Maestro software is useful for organising your Olive Music collection, but it is slow and clunky and not in the same league as something like ITunes.
 

jaxwired

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Feb 7, 2009
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Yep. There's some scathing reviews of olives earlier models on amazon as well. I'm in the software biz so I know how hard it is for a small company to get it right. Often they just don't test it enough before it goes prime time. Most likely they have no official "QA" people, the programmers do it themselves. That never works well.
 

Bodfish

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Jun 25, 2009
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Well, it'll be no consolation, but I've not experienced any of the issues you're describing with mine.

The iPhone app is truly awful but the touchscreen/remote interface works perfectly for me in my listening room.
 

Henley

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Sorry to hear of the troubles but it's the first we've heard if it so will look out for your machine being retruned from the dealer.

Jaxwired - that's a bit of a bold assumption considering you probably do not know the operation. I am happy to confirm that Olive have dedicated QA staff and each model is tested post production and often on entry into the UK at Henley.

Bodfish - I am pleased to say that I have seen the new app and it is far, far superior. This will be made available early November, needless to say, free of charge.
 

The_Lhc

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Oct 16, 2008
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roycymru:The Hard Drive, which is supposed to be insulated in 10 layers of noise insulation has got progressively noisy in the few Weeks I have had it and when on you can her the Hard Drive going "clunk, clunk", clunk, clunk" then occasionally interrupted by a series of rapid disk access noises.

That sounds remarkably like a dead or dying hard disk to me, which I suspect could probably cause most of the issues you were seeing. You didn't think of having the Olive swapped for a new one, just to see if it was all of them, rather than just one duff one?
 

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