Olive Musica Releases Their Newest Digital Music Streamer the OPUS Nº5

We had brought you news of an earlier product from Olive awhile back called the Opus Nº3 and we were very impressed by what we saw. A high end digital media player that catered to the audiophiles. It had a lot of very high end internals like a 24-bit/192 kHz Dac by Burr-Brown to deliver a rich sound from your digital media among others. Well they have a new product out now, the OPUS Nº5

As with all of their products these devices have a CD tray so that you can rip your music directly onto the internal hard drive. The new Nº5 comes in two models with either a 500GB or 700GB internal drive. Using either a wired or wireless connection you can stream music from your PC as well. Add to that the USB ports allowing you to hook up external drives and you now have a self contained music jukebox that has no limit on storage.

When you insert a CD into the Nº5 and choose to rip it the system will automatically gather all the necessary information and tag it appropriately. This really takes the hassle out of doing that yourself. One thing we wonder though is how they prevent mistakes. The online databases always seem to have multiple entries for a lot of the CDs we rip so we aren't sure how this unit picks the 'correct' one, but i guess the internal database they use must have gone through a heavy amount of testing and tweaking. We haven't heard any major complaints about this aspect so we can only assume that it is working well.

The major drawback of these devices is the price. The Nº5 lists for $3500. That is a lot of money to expect someone to plunk down for what they could probably get for a lot cheaper. Just look at the Transporter from Slimdevices, that retails for $2000 and from what can tell matches up very nicely with this unit minus the CD tray. We haven't seen anything in the Nº5 to separate it from the rest of the high end streamers on the market so we can't say this is a must buy, but if you are in the market for a device with all of these features, with the high end components, with the internal storage and auto CD ripper, than it could be worth a shot. Olive constantly gets great reviews on their products and this one is no different, we just wish the price wasn't so high.

October 19, 2007

Olive Musica Releases Their Newest Digital Music Streamer the OPUS Nº5