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Do-Everything Digital Music Server
Olive Media Products calls its Symphony a "wireless music center." It's a single device that handles pretty much every listening-to-digital music function you can think of: It rips, mixes, and burns music to CD; plays music; streams tunes to your Mac; and uploads songs to an iPod.
The Symphony comes with an 80GB hard disk and a CD drive. It's shaped like a stereo component, with gold plated RCA jacks in addition to four Ethernet, two USB, and two S/PDIF ports. The most basic use of the Symphony is to rip your CDs to its hard disk- you can copy in FLAC, MP3, AIFF, or WAV- and play the music back through your stereo. The Symphony plays music in the aforementioned formats plus Ogg Vorbis, WMA, and ACC.
Music transferred directly to the hard drive sounds great, especially when stored in FLAC format- songs are essentially indistinguishable from CDs played on a good CD player. The Symphony has a special quiet hard drive, a custom low-noise power supply, and no fan, so there's no distracting equipment noise.
Once you've transferred your tunes, the Symphony becomes an all-purpose music server. Aside from just playing songs through your stereo, you can use the Symphony's Ethernet or 802.11g wireless-networking capability to stream audio to your Mac, or stream your Mac's music to your stereo. You can also connect your iPod to one of the Symphony's USB ports and copy music from the symphony to your iPod, or play music from your iPod through the Symphony.
The Symphony can also digitalize an extensive vinyl or cassette collection. Since the Symphony plugs into your stereo system, it can digitize music from any of your other components, such as your turntable or tape deck. It can also burn CDs of your digitized music provided you use CDs labeled as Music CD-Rs.
The Symphony offers a nice way to integrate digital music into your home entertainment center, if you'd rather leave you Mac out of the picture.