Olive Opus: First Impressions - Page 38

Last weekend, I went downstairs to listen to my trusty Musica and I noticed that the LCD screen was almost completely black (the edges were lit up, but the main portion was basically a black square). It was definitely powered up and I could access and play music via my network, but the screen appears to be out of commission. When I use the jog dial to navigate through menus, I can faintly see things changing on the screen, but I can't make any of it out. I attempted to email Olive, but they have yet to respond. So now I have a couple of questions.

Do any Olive reps frequent this forum? Does anyone know if it would be worth it for me to try to send it in to get a screen replacement/fix?

Thanks guys. Oh and Merry Christmas!!

Awhile back, while looking at the Hifidelio site I saw some information about replacement LCD screens that could be purchased. They didn't come directly Hifidelio. They were pretty cheap if I recall and seemed like they were an off the shelf component.

Well, the results are mixed from my experiment. I have a 500 GB Musica hooked up wired Ethernet to my main Hi-fi setup, and an 80GB Symphony hooked up wirelessly with an Ethernet bridge to my secondary Hi-fi setup. On my Mac computer I can see and access both to import. I can connect to, and control, both via VNC or the Lenore web-based application. Now, to answer your question: I can see, control, and play (stream) the Symphony from my Musica - both via VNC and Lenore. It shows up in the "Music Server" listing in the main menu. But, my Musica does not show up on the Symphony as a server, and I cannot play the Musica from the Symphony. A bummer actually, since there's so much more music on the Musica. It is probably a matter of some Ethernet network setting, and when I have a chance I'm going to check out both units to see if there's any difference in how they are configured.

Let me know if you have any success on your units,
Ed

Ed,
Thanks for the info.
I tried it on mine and was able to go both ways. The only thing I couldn't do was to get my Musica to read the external HD connected to my Symphony.
Also, the Musica locked up once and had to do a hard shut off. I think this was due to me not understanding the menu situation which gets a little complicated with them connected.
You may want to play around with this a little.
Seems work very well actually.
Thanks again.
Gary

Ed,
One other thing. You probably aready did this, but just in case, make sure both units have both the UPN set to "on" for both send and receive.

Turned out a simple restart of the Symphony made the Musica show up in the Server List. I can now play in both directions. Cool. I can't believe I've never tried that before. :-)

Thanks for the reply. I did a little looking around via google but I didn't see anything that helped my particular situation. Olive finally got back to me and it looks like its gonna run me around $150 to get it fixed and shipped back. It's strange, but I was almost hoping that the quote would be outrageous so I could use that as an excuse to look into the Sonos system instead.

In all seriousness though, $150 did seem a little steep but it's easier to justify that than an entirely new system. Any other help or suggestions out there??

Apollo,

Sorry to hear that, but not surprised the price is that steep. I'd be tempted to throw down an extra $150 and get one of the refurb units from ebay that Ed mentioned some posts back.

Better hurry. They sold out the dozen or so black units in three days, and after starting with almost 40 silver ones they are down to just ten left!

Anybody out there pick up one of the Ebay Musicas? It is certainly a tempting option considering the price of fixing my current one. Just a little apprehensive though, I mean, why can't they tell us the storage space on them individually. The whole crap shoot thing makes me a little uneasy.

Apollo,

I did, but my purchase was made from the previous ebay re-sale (april 09 timeframe) from olive. This is the second clearance sale of the 3's that I've seen.

I picked up a silver 160 gb refurb musica. I've since upgraded to a 500 gb drive and the latest firmware with no problems (knock on wood) that others haven't noted from brand new units.

I see that the ones left are without remotes, but that is of no concern to me. I am still on the fence so we'll see. Thanks for the replies.

In regards to the liquidation in general, does anyone know why they have so many refurbs/used Musicas? Are people trading them in to upgrade to a newer unit? If so, that is certainly intriguing. I would love to upgrade if possible.

I checked with Olive. They told me that the software they use for playback was created by their German affiliate (Hermstetd?)

This is what they said in response to by inquiry about why I can't play 96/24 files:

"So, we have consulted with our development team, and were notified that the Olive 5 did not support playback of 24/96 files -- its DAC had the capabilities of upsampling 16/44.1 to 24/88.2 - but it does not have playback support for HD files.

"Obviously you got it to handle the files -- but the software is obviously misinterpreting/handling them, which is most likely because they never wrote the software to handle that application.

"Sorry to be the bearer of bad news -- but, just an FYI -- our new Olive 4HD can handle those."

Actually, they were very responsive, but just with the wrong answer.

Is there a way to add 2 FLAC files together? Maybe by adding a second identical copy of the file to the end of the first file, it would still play 1/2 of the total file, but all of the music selection. Just curious, I don't think I would do that since it would take up twice the space.

Well, thanks for the effort anyway. I guess we are stuck with 16/44. I tried the latest software update from Hifidelio; and, even though it won't work with a lot of the features in our older Olive units, it won't play 24/96 on them either. So I guess they never figured it out for the older units.

If Olive ever gets their act together enough to make the newer units as useful to me as my older one, I'll buy one in a minute. But I'm certainly not going to hold my breath.

I am intrigued about what Olive means when they say the software was not designed to handle high-resolution files: it is obvious that the DAC will not convert such files, but will they be output to the digital out?As to Olive kind and disinterested advice that we look into the Opus 4-HD, a quick glance at the "official" AVS forum on the Opus 4 series will show that the HD feature still needs some improvements. It would be nice if Olive offered a relatively inexpensive option in the form of a HD-capable version of the Melody, as it would "see" and decode HD files stored on an older Opus or a Musica, but that does not seem likely.

M.G.

Found one. Please disregard this post.

Just a reminder that I'm still looking for a black Symphony/Musica/3/3S/5 with at least a 160GB hard drive. For a reasonable price. :-)
Better to e-mail than PM, but I do check for PMs about once a week.
Thanks.

Hi, I have an Olive/Musica with firmware 2.3.8 PRO. It's been working good, so I never thought about updating.

Recently I upgraded my wireless router. Two things now bother me. (1) Internet Radio stopped working. (2) WPA does not work. (I used WEP with my old router, but wanted to switch to WPA. There is a button for WPA under Networking, but I couldn't make it to work. Maybe it's never really there?)

My question: If I want to update the firmware, which version do you recommend? I saw a version 2.3.18 (for Opus) available from Olive website. Is it the right version to use?

Thanks!

Hi, and welcome to the club!

2.3.18 is a viable and recommended update for your Musica. There is also a 2.3.21 update on the HiFiDelio website that works, but I really haven't noticed any difference on my Musica.

Internet radio has been problematic for all of us, and I don't know of anyone who has it working properly.

Wireless is also a problem area. I don't have any answers for you since I use wired ethernet, but there a many posts earlier in this thread about both wireless and internet radio problems. I would recommend that you read through the earlier posts to see what you might learn. I know there are a lot of posts, but there is a lot of good info there from members who have since moved on to the Olive 4/HD forum.

Feel free to post any answers or further problems on the forum. I keep an eye on it from time to time, but I don't know who else is still around.

Cheers, Ed

Ed, Thanks for the info. I upgraded my Musica to firmware 2.3.18 without any issue. However, the problems I had with WPA and the internet radio still remain (WEP is working fine). But at least I know now that I'm not alone on the internet radio problem. I also finally finished browsing the past posts in this forum, and found lots of useful info. Thank you in particular for experimenting other versions of firmware from Hifidelio!

You're more than welcome. I love to try out new things, and am a sucker for new, untried stuff. It definitely gets me into trouble sometimes, but I can usually wiggle out of it somehow.

As I said, I'm currently running 2.3.21 on my 2 Musicas and 1 Symphony (I know, very sick puppy) without any problems. But, since I never was able to find out what was different from .18 to .21 I don't recommend it to anyone else. It still doesn't fix internet radio. :-(

One thing some might find interesting is an experiment I tried last week. My trusty old Musica - the one in which I upgraded the hard drive to 500GB - started having a problem with the display getting darker. Then the jog/shuttle wheel started "sticking" so you had to manually turn it back to center every once in a while. Then, the last straw, I removed the analog output interconnects and the "gold" contacts pulled right off the built-in connector! None of these problems prevented me from using the Musica, but I started to hunt for a replacement - as some of you know. Besides, the old Musica was silver, and the only silver unit in my whole Hi-fi setup, so I wanted a black one.

I found a 160 GB black Musica in like-new condition, and bought it. Here's where the fun started. I wanted to put the 500GB drive from my old unit into the new, but I figured that I would have to do an HD reset on both drives and re-load all of my music - many, many hours worth of work. So, I took the 160 GB drive out of the new one and put it into the old one. I then ran the HD reset program, and to my amazement, when I restarted it booted up perfectly, and my library showed up completely intact! I couldn't believe it! So, I put the 500GB drive into the new Musica, did the HD reset, and voila! - all my music was immediately available. No re-loading required!

I doubt that too many of you will be swapping hard drives from one Olive to another, but if you ever need to do it at least you'll know that it does work without a complete re-load of your music.

Cheers,
Ed

After some research, I figured out the problem with internet radio on my Musica. Now I can access hundreds of stations!

In my case, the problem turned out to be the DNS setting. For internet radio to work, Musica needs to first access the radio station directory at wwwshoutcastcom, then the individual station website you choose. The DNS setting must be correct, so that the unit can understand web addresses. Before I upgraded my router, I was using DHCP, and the DNS setting was done automatically. Now, I'm using the 'Expert Mode', hence need to set DNS manually (which I forgot to do earlier). After getting my ISP's DNS address from my router, and entering it to the network setting on the Musica, The radio stations all appeared.

Hope this info is useful to those of you who have a similar problem.

I bow to your problem solving skills! My internet radio now works!
I wonder how many people can't get internet radio in Expert mode because of the same problem.....

Seriously, good catch on the DNS settings in Expert mode. I also had to enter my router number (which happens to be the same as the DNS number for me) to make it work.

Thank you very much,
Ed

Has anyone been able to stream FLAC files from their Symphony, Musica, etc. to their PC?
I noticed on the Official Olive OPUS' thread that someone was using XBMC to stream.
I downloaded the XBMC program, but I can't get it to read my Olives using Upnp.
Anyone out there doing this?
Thanks

I was able to do this on a done this on a Mac running Songbird. The Olive shows up under the "Shared" heading, and loads a list of all of the music on the Olive, appropriately categorized by Genre, Artist, Album. I was even able to stream some HD music which my Olive 5 will not play (although not all HD files work). I know that Songbird has a Windows version.

Listed my olive opus 4 on eBay today if anyone's interested.