Just got a pair of them in today... Nice looking--not 1/2" aluminum plate crowd nice, but OK for quasi-mass market stuff. I'll be interested in seeing how they look lit up and, more importantly, how they sound...
Showing 7 responses by edesilva
Seems silly to me. How different is this from, say, the Escient products? I also think its kind of odd to spend that much on something that is a closed "black box" when you can easily replicate the functionality with known, best-of-class off the shelf hardware. And get something that has much more functionality. Computers for people who don't like computers. |
Onhwy61--I agree that the Olive represents an attempt to mask a computer with a more friendly face. I guess my problem is that for any moderately technically competent user--like most of the folks on A'gon--its hard to see the value proposition. Face it, if you can operate a browser, you can surely run iTunes. Frankly, your computer probably already has enough horsepower and disk space to play in this game, and all you need is a reasonable interface between the computer and the stereo... A M-Audio Transit is what, like $100 bucks? I guess my $0.02 for anyone thinking of this is that two years from now, you will feel an awful lot better if you make the moderate investment in learning enough about computers to go with a normal platform instead of this kind of box... |
You might also look at the squeezebox 3 if you have a computer on all the time and a wireless network: http://www.slimdevices.com/ |
Baroque_lover, the Mac Mini route is the way I went. I've got a massive NAS RAID setup with the library on it, and run iTunes via a Mac Mini with a BT keyboard and mouse. I'm actually thinking of going another route, however. I figure I can pick up a fanless small form factor PC--something like a Sumicom or Serener XP box--for relatively cheap. I can run iTunes off a windows platform, and use a USB audio output device the way I do with my Mac Mini. The benefit of this route is that I can dust off an old 10" viewsonic airpanel--an 802.11 wireless touchscreen display--and run a remote desktop for the PC--having iTunes control while on the couch in touchscreen form. This also gives me the option of tacking on some USB/RS232 converters, an IR generator, and running Mainlobby and Girder to consolidate all system control functions on the airpanel. Think of it as a 10" color touchscreen wireless remote with iTunes control... |
Think the mac mini has to be wired into your system (at least your display), so having it with you isn't really feasible. For the laptops, the theory is that the airport can be used to stream to a DAC, so you would have the airport next to your stereo, plugged into a wall wart and your DAC via coax. The laptop would stream data to the AP wirelessly. Cannot comment on that one, because I've never tried it, but I'm pretty confident on the set up. The strange part of the laptop thing that I've never liked is that if you run it in conjunction with a NAS (network attached storage), presumably the laptop has to pull data off the network via 802.11, process it, and then push it back out to the airport for routing to the DAC. Seems like the data has to go both to and from the computer via wireless for that to work, and I don't know whether there is enuf bandwidth. Of course, you can always maintain the library on the notebook. I've never wanted to do that b/c I've got too many files. YMMV. The squeezebox is a thin-client. You hook a squeezebox up to a network (wireless or wirelessly) and also to your DAC. The squeezebox interacts with an application running on another computer on the network (in background mode, generally), which "pushes" data out to the squeezebox based on input from the IR remote that talks to the squeezebox. |