Tech Gadgets

Intoduction

We can describe the Olive 4HD Hi-Fi Music Server in one word: Exquisite. If you love music—collecting it, archiving it, and above all, listening to it—this is the digital audio player you should own. If you’re not an audiophile, on the other hand, you might dismiss this $1,999 device with a few other “ex” words: Excessive, extravagant, or extreme, perhaps. Indeed, there’s almost no task the Olive 4HD can do that can’t be duplicated on just about any properly equipped PC (we’re talking a machine equipped with the $180 Asus Xonar Essence STX sound card). But good luck finding a PC that’s entirely passively cooled in order to operate in perfect silence, as the Olive 4HD does—you can’t even hear this machine’s internal CD-burner spin. You might find a passively cooled home theater PC, but it won’t have a 4.3-inch touchscreen or the capability to stream audio to an equally exquisite client, and it certainly wouldn’t be this easy to use

Features and Design

The Olive 4HD looks a little like standalone CD player, but it features a slot-feed optical drive so you never hear the whir of gears as a tray slides out to accept your disc. Olive went so far as to put a lip on the slot to prevent mechanical noises from leaking out (the internal hard drive is wrapped in eight layers of sound-deadening padding). The front panel is slanted, which makes using the touchscreen and the buttons easy when the device is placed on a surface between your waist and your chin, but you won’t want to place it any higher or lower. That presented a problem in our entertainment center, which is designed to house our A/V components above one of our tower speakers. The most frequently used device, the A/V receiver, is on the bottom shelf and our Blu-ray player is above that. We had to put the 4HD above that, which meant we needed a ladder to operate it. Olive maintains that the player can be stacked on top of a receiver, but we’d be concerned about the receiver’s ventilation and the player’s heat dissipation.