Olive works 400GB into Opus digital music centre
Holds more ripped CDs than you can shake Karajan's baton at
Olive has announced the latest version of its latest high-end digital music separate, this time called the Opus and equipped with a 400GB hard drive - enough, the company claims, to hold 660 uncompressed CDs, 1,100 ripped using lossless compression, or 7,230 albums ripped to 128KBps MP3 files.
Past Olive products were developed and made in Germany by Hermstedt, but Olive claims the new model was "designed and custom-made in the USA". In addition to the much bigger storage capacity - up from 80GB and 160GB from, respectively, the Olive Symphony/Hermstedt Hifidelio and Olive Musica/Hermstedt Hifidelio Pro - there are now for Texas Instruments Burr-Brown 24-bit digital-to-analogue converters with 8x oversampling fed by a separate temperature-compensated crystal oscillator and driven by a linear power supply.
Like Musica/Symphony/Hifidelio, Opus has a CD drive ready to play or rip your music collection - and burn custom CDs. There are USB ports to hook up an iPod and copy songs across to the portable player. The unit has 802.11g Wi-Fi and a four-port 10/100Mbps Ethernet switch on board, ready to stream music to and from remote systems such as Macs, PCs and Hermstedt's ST-64 remote controller and speaker combo.
Track details are displayed on the range's usual seven-line, 400 x 160, four-greyscale LCD. Ripped songs are immediately compared to the built-in 2m-track song-title database to populate ID tags.
Olive said the Opus will ship early this month for $2999. It's available in black or silver. ®
