Well I bought an Opus 2 so I can now answer this... and the answer is no, it is not possible to use Opus 2 as a standalone streamer. According to the specs it should be possible but in practice the Opus 2 was a disaster. Here are some examples:<br />
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- It is supposed to play 24/192 but in fact Olive says "currently we don't support the playback of 24bit files because we fight processor problems with that big amount of data to stream"<br />
- mine would not stream from a Windows Home Server NAS. Nothing. Zip. Not even internet radio. According to my dealer this is a known issue and there is a software fix on the way. Olive said "There are improvements planned for the Melody, so it maybe fixed with this release." but couldnt give me a beta. <br />
- It will stream on a Windows PC with Tversity or Twonky but will not display any information on whats playing. No album art, no track or album name, no data, no play time, just an orange triangle meaning something is playing.<br />
- Will not run on a Windpows PC with Asset UpnP. Olive support says Asset is not supported but will be with a future software release.<br />
- It is impossible to ever turn it off! The manual says you might damage it by disconnecting the power in sleep mode, but the "off button" only functions to put it in sleep or restart it.<br />
- the interface / software is extremely poor and incredibly frustrating. If it doesnt work, the Olive itself will not give you any help re why. Mine needed a USB restart twice in the 3 days I was fiddling around with it and the performance swung between quick and completely frozen for no apparent reason.<br />
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If Olive could only fix the software then this could still be a great product. But given it was released almost 2 years ago Im not holding my breath, or my Opus. Unfortunately mine is it is going back and like musicjones I think the Olive story is... well just that. I will be trying the (genuinely) 24/96 capable Squeezebox Touch when it arrives, with precisely the same functionality at 1/3rd of the price plus genuine multi-room capability and better online functionality (Spotify etc).