Digitalmeisters - Thoughts on Olive.....

The Bryston BDP-1 seems like an excellent piece of gear. I own a Bryston B60 and am a huge fan of their philosophy. The BDP-1 is expensive, but they followed a cost no object, sound quality over convenience approach. No wireless, no internal storage, etc. It simply plays digital files that you connect to it - ie thumb drive or hard drive.

What you could do is rip your CDs, save them to an external hard drive, then simply plug that into the BDP-1 and yoy're good to go. Well connect a DAC, then you're good to go.

Bryston is expensive, but more than worth their price IMO. They're a no-nonsense company that admirably stands behind everything they've ever built. I've dealt with them to upgrade my B60 and just some general questions. Great people. If it fits your budget and criteria, I highly recommend them.

Do you need any special kind of software to do this? Perhaps my questions are so basic that I am going to have research the rudiments here.

In addition to PuBul's question, as cool as the BDP-1 looks, how does it improve computer music file SQ over a device that outputs a bit-perfect digital signal, such as a squeezebox touch?

I'm making exactly this transition right now.

First, spend more time thinking about the interface. With CDs, you just walked over to your shelf and grabbed the disc, probably based on your familiarity with the color of the spine, and the location (alphabetical, by genre, whatever you used). So how are you going to accomplish that with an "all-bits" system? Even a tiny bit of interface friction can make you listen to music less than you otherwise would. And all the expensive gear in the world won't sound better than cheap stuff when it's sitting ther silently.

I really like iTunes on Mac. It's generally easy to use, and I can trust that Apple will keep supporting and improving it. Album art, lots of ways to reorganize, easy lossless-to-lossy conversion for you iPod. A free "Remote" app for that lets your iPhone or iPad control iTunes from across the room, designed by people who take interface seriously (and each version gets better). All in all, iTunes has the mix of features that works for me.

Sooloos/Meridian is another that people love. Big touch screen, lots of enhanced meta-data. But expensive.

All the others -- Olive, Sonos, "rip all your music to a hard drive and use the DAC" -- for me are far less useful from a user interface point of view. How do I browse from across the room? How fast is it to browse a library of 20,000 tracks by hundreds of artists?

Think first about how you want to "touch" your music collection. Then think about expensive DACs (BTW, I use a Halide USB-to-SPDIF bridge to get the bits from an iMac to a Benchmark DAC, or direct USB to Ayre QB-9, both sound great. There is tweaking to do, but don't assume that just because computers use 75 cent parts to output bits, that somehow they can't sound just as good as the SPDIF output on an expensive transport).

Fvl, certainly, you are correct in that there have never been more interfaces to choose from and it's a very personal decision. You will also find many people who like and hate the same interface so it has become almost as important a decision as the sound of the music.

To all... just because it says Bit Perfect, that still does not assure timing and distortion problems do not exist (jitter). In a standard Mac or PC, these still must be addressed, the 75 cent parts won't do it. Lots of converters to choose from ($100's - $1000's) and also DAC's that reclock the signal to clean it up.

So if you want to do the "tweaking", there are lots of options to choose from, but you will spend $$$ to get it right. If not, there are well engineered systems and you will spend $$$ for a good one.

BTW, I'm in the tweaking category... but I respect the efforts of those like Bryston who do it right.

Paul