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Classical Gas
In one sense, upscale music servers make no sense. They are intended for a sophisticated audience, yet they employ databases designed primarily for pop music. Classical music fans will surely prefer listening to the Symphony, a server from San Francisco based manufacturer Olive. The Symphony's internal database lets you search your music collection not only by the usual song title, performer, and composer, but also by the movement, opus number, performance location, lead musician, and even key. You can, for example, listen to all the Brahms symphonies that conductor Zubin Mehta recorded, in New York City, in F major.
The unit's noble endeavors are aided by its elegant, basic-black design and intuitive front-panel controls. An attractive iPodlike interface makes music browsing easy. Olive builds Symphony for demanding ears. It incorporates a linear power supply common in high-end audio components but rare in music servers, and a special extra-quiet hard drive. The unit stores about 200 albums in FLAC format, and about six times that many in MP3 format.
The Symphony offers an astonishing array of features: It burns Cds of your favorite arias, it streams digital music files from PC and Macintosh computers through your WiFi network, and it plays Internet radio stations. But these bells and whistles seem superfluous on a unit that is so perfectly focused on providing pure listening pleasure.