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katerwall

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  1. Look more closely. I’ve had an Olive 4HD, their top model, for ten months. The limitations of THAT machine are frustrating and maddening. Reading the copy on Olive’s site (which seduced me into buying their product), everything seems marvy keen. So, the argument is that Olive simplifies access to the music, right? But Olive’s iPhone app simply doesn’t work as advertised; it throws the user out at random. They’ve made lame excuses about working on it for the entire year. Olive’s remote control almost always interferes with other components in a system, and then neither device works without a restart. The touchscreen on the Olive works if you have infinite patience while paging through layers of poorly organized information, tiny fingertips, and are ready to stand in front of your machine to to search for a track on a cramped screen. Where’s the convenience that a music server is supposed to provide? Since Olive’s Maestro PC interface does not seem to be available for the Olive 3, I presume you must accept the crazy cover art, almost always wrong, and weird file labels the Olive plops into the display from its on-the-disc data base. Olive’s response to these limitations? “It’s a work in progress.” But there’s been no progress. Olive’s backup system, the only activated use for the USB port on the back of the machine, uses proprietary encoding, so you cannot transfer anything but the entire backup into the Olive, should the hard disc fail (replacement available, because the unit is sealed, only from Olive). So much for the elements the Olive 3 & 4HD have in common. The small hard disc on the Olive 3 is a joke, given current pricing. The lack of a digital output, available on even cheap CD players negates the possibility that owners might, by adding an external DAC, improve their system and expand their interest in digital audio. (The DAC in the Olive 3 is also a step down: a Cirrus, rather than the Burr-Brown in the Olive 4HD.) If Olive had streamlined functionality by improving or simplifying the interface elements, they would have a winning $999 product. The only justification for the cost difference between the Olive 3 & 4HD is a marketing alignment. (I might add as a caution, that Olive increased the price of the 4HD from $1999 to $2499 earlier this year.) kw
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