SAVE THE SOUND.
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A Symphony of musical pleasures.
A new hi-fi component blends several popular technologies that make beautiful music together.
Just because a bunch of individual ingredients are delicious doesn't mean they'll taste good when they're all cooked up together. Ask anyone who's ever sampled a 5-year-old chef's rendition of chocolate-chip spaghetti with meat sauce and grape jelly. Similarly, many an electronics company has tried and failed to slap together a decent product from buzzword-compliant components - say, iPods, wireless networks, sound systems and personal computers.
So you might not have high hopes for the Olive Symphony, a $900 hi-fi component (www.olive.us) that merges all of those technologies and more. But instead of creating a multiheaded digital Frankenstereo, the company managed to make all of those technologies and features feel natural together. The resulting box takes a long time to describe, because it does so much. But it takes surprisingly little time to master, and most of its features are usable whether you own a computer or not.
A one-line description? Well, think of the Symphony as an iPod for your stereo. Inside is a completely silent, fanless, 80-gigabyte hard drive that stores up to 20,000 songs. (A 160-gigabyte model, the Musica, is available for $1,100. It has a fan, but you'd practically have to climb inside the thing to hear it.). The back panel has both analog and digital outputs to your sound system.
The front panel's scroll wheel and bright, monochrome screen permit quick navigation through gigantic music collections by song title, playlist, album name, and so on.
Now, Olive isn't the first company to invent a stereo component with a hard drive. What makes the Symphony, which will be shipped to stores next week, so interesting is all the different ways music gets onto and off of it.
Take the built-in CD player, for example. When you slip a CD into the slot and press the glowing Play button, the music begins. The song and band names appear on the screen in huge letters, visible from across the room, courtesy of the machine's built-in 2-million-album database of album and track names.
By pressing one button, you can copy the CD onto the Symphony's hard drive. The process takes about 45 seconds a song; you choose the audio format and quality setting. (You get the quoted 20,000-song capacity only with the MP3 format, which is not exactly the audiophile's dream. Choose WAV, AIFF or FLAC for better quality. These are lossless formats - meaning "adored by classical-music nuts"- that fill up the hard drive much faster. The Symphony stores about 2,000 songs in FLAC format.)
And what if you have 1,200 CDs? Are you really expected to sit there, drumming your fingers, feeding the box another disc every nine minutes? Don't be silly. Olive has made an offer you can't refuse: it will preload all of your CDs onto a new Symphony's hard drive. You just pay for one-way shipping for the discs. (This offer is good until at least Jan. 1, 2006. Even after that, the service will always be available, but it won't always be free.).
The Symphony box can also rescue your old records and tapes. If you're willing to connect your tape deck or record player to the Symphony, it can turn each song into a full-blown digital track that behaves just like the songs you've copied from a CD.
Once your music collection is safely ensconced on the Symphony, you can exile the original CDs, tapes and records to the attic. From now on, you can call up any album right on the screen. You can also mix and match tracks into playlists of your own. Better yet, the Symphony's CD player is also a CD recorder, so you can burn your music - including the tunes you've rescued from your old tapes and LPs - onto shiny new CDs.
There's more. You can also connect an iPod or any MP3 player directly to a USB jack on the Symphony (which also recharges the player). Amazingly, the iPod's own music collection now appears on the Symphony's screen, ready for playing through your stereo system. (The Symphony does not, however, play copy-protected files, like songs from the iTunes music store.). You can also copy music from the Symphony's hard drive to the iPod.
The Symphony doesn't even wipe out all of the music that's already on the iPod; it's content to add, not replace. Overall, this Symphony-to-iPod copying business is pretty slick. This is a machine with vast potential for musical pleasure - and for confusion. In general, the simple iPod-dish, drill-down-to-the-right-menu system keeps all these features easy to find. There's plenty to learn and troubleshoot, however, especially at the outset.
OLIVE SYMPHONY
Price: $899
Website: www.olive.us
What is it? Think of the Symphony as an iPod for your stereo. Inside is a completely silent, fanless, 80-gigabyte hard drive that stores up to 20,000 songs.