Olive makes really nice, fairly expensive audio gear for audiophiles who still haven’t gone digital. While this is a shrinking market, I guess there are enough oldsters out there who still haven’t ripped their copy of A Farewell to Kings so this is for them. It’s basically a 2TB hard drive with built-in optical drive. You pop in a disk, it records the audio, and then plays it back at lossless quality. You have a full touchscreen on front for selecting the music. How much does the pleasure of listening to Dark Side Of The Moon in digital form cost? $4,999. Bam. How’s that for money, grandpa music lover?
In all honesty Olive definitely cares about the music. If you’re really into audio, you could do worse especially considering these specs:
Two TI 192khz/24-bit Burr- Brown PCM1792 running in mono mode
Ultra-low jitter master clock (10 picoseconds after re-clocking)
TI SRC4194 Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter (Up-sampling to 24-bit/384 kHz)
Ultra-fast op amps (< 20V/us slew-rate)
Analog filter: 2nd-order Bessel reconstruction filter
Yeah, heck if I know what any of that means either. All I know is that we had the previous version at the house a few months ago and it was pretty cool. This model plays HD audio and includes iPad and iPhone controls for those so inclined. As we all know, high-end audio is 8 parts truth and 2 parts snake oil, but these guys usually keep the ratio down to fifty-fifty.
Product Page