Anyone have experience with Olive 06HD?

By chance, I went to a streaming demo at my local store last weekend. They had the Naim HDX and the Olive 06 and 04. Firstly, I'm afraid, the 06 is way ahead of the 04 in sound quality, greater detail and bigger sound stage. The Naim HDX was comparable to the 06.

It is difficult to compare as they were in different rooms, the 06 a Krell Kef blade set up, the Naim, a naim electronics and Sonus Faber stand system.

I would put both at a comparable level to my Leema Antilla, a good player in the £2500 price level, so neither of the straming solutions seem to challenge very good quality CD players, yet. The retailer rapidly configured an Ipad to control the olive.

On both systems, Hi res, 24/96 I believe, clearly beat standard CD quality and a big plus, was the quality of some of the better internet radio channels.

So I would say from this demo only, streaming is not yet matching top CD quality, but that is my only exposure, so there may well be better.

The weakness of the 4HD is the dac, which is not nearly as well implemented as it is in the 6HD. I own an 04, and have it routing its signals to a Bryston BDA-1 DAC, and the resulting sound quality is exceptional. If you already have a quality DAC, the 4HD could save you a great deal of money.

Hi
allthoug there are some good reviews out there, I can´t help wondering how on earth nobody has commented the lack of ssd.

I have an Olive HD60. WARNING: In my opinion it is useless for large CD collections. I had hoped it would make finding and playing CD's from a collection of nearly 4,000 classical music CD's easier. While it is simple and fast to rip them to the HD, the metadata is usually wrong, missing, or useless for searching purposes. I am not sure how much of this problem is due to the device's use of an internal database or each CD's stored data. I use the database Music Label 2012 (fantastic and inexpensive software) to organize this collection for searching. This pulls down accurate data for each CD from Gracenote CDDB2. Wish the Olive would do that. To edit each entry into the Olive, one has to use the online software Maestro which connects to your Olive over your network. Maestro is excruciatingly slow and unstable and poorly organized. It has to be restarted often. Hence, after painfully entering only about 300 CD's with corrected data into the Olive over many evenings, I quit. By the time I would get it all in, the device would be obsolete and I may have died along the way. Maestro makes the Olive HD60 useless for large collections, especially for classical music with its necessary long titles and bits of critical search information. So its just sitting waiting for either something better to come along or a major overhaul of Maestro. The server does sound great, though I have to admit I am only accustomed to low cost audio gear. But to my ears it sounds very distinctly better than playing from my CD players. Again I have low cost gear so that is what I am comparing it to. One set-up is a Jolida JD100 tube CD player through a Jolida 202A tube amp to Yamaha NS-1000M speakers. Another is a Tascam CD player through a Jolida 302B tube amp to a pair of Yamaha NS-1000M speakers. The third set-up in my house, in the kitchen, is an Eastern Electric Minimax tube CD player through a Jolida 202A amp to a pair of Dynaudio Audience 42 bookshelf speakers. The Olive is my fourth set-up, playing through a Jolida 302B to a pair of Axiom M60's. The difference I hear I can not assign totally to the great Axiom speakers so the distinction seems likely attributable to playing direct from a HD and the components in the Olive. Still, unless one can organize and mark the stored collection in the Olive for searching large collections with complex data, its useless. Another fault I find is the really large text on its screen and on the iPhone used as a remote. I can only see a few words of each title. If a CD title begins with my inventory number and composer: "2810 Beethoven...." that's about all I can see. I can not see the composer's title let along the Opus number or key. That large type (do they think we are all of poor eyesight?) makes the Olive especially useless for classical music. I expect there will be a small surge of competitive products coming along soon. I should have waited awhile. But maybe Olive expects this too and will get busy making their device useful. Finally, the touch screen is poorly responsive.

The CD drawer jammed on my 4 on the second day and had to be returned.