Olive Expands Storage of Opus Hi-Fi Digital Stereo

Based in San Francisco, CA, Olive, a company creating a new standard in high quality digital music experiences, unveiled a new generation of its Opus Hi-Fi Digital Stereo, including an unprecedented two terabyte version of its flagship Opus No. 4.

The Opus No. 4 lets consumers experience their music at home in true hi-fi sound quality. It stores thousands of CDs worth of music in original quality, connects to traditional stereo systems and allows playback through an intuitive touchscreen menu. The Opus No. 4 uses the latest technology to combine hi-fi sound quality and easy digital music access in an elegant design with a compelling price point.

"Olive is redefining the digital music experience for the home, much as the iPod did for portable music," said Dr. Oliver Bergmann, CEO and co-founder of Olive. "The Opus No. 4 makes it easy to enjoy the music you’ve collected over the years with the same vivid sound clarity as your CDs, but without the hassle and clutter."

Until now, people had two choices in digital music – media cabinets full of CDs that offered high-quality sound, and convenient digital players like the iPod that offered low-quality MP3 sound. Olive eliminates this dilemma, bringing the familiar ease and accessibility of digital music to the home stereo, storing thousands of CDs worth of music – at full CD fidelity – in a unit the size of a conventional home CD player that requires no connection to a PC.

With more than 200 billion CDs sold worldwide , consumers have amassed 2 trillion songs in their CD collections, 250 times more than have been purchased as digital downloads.

"Consumers need ways to easily access the digital music they have as well as discover new music in a networked environment without sacrificing audio quality and in a format that seamlessly integrates with their existing music listening behavior. Home networks will be in more than 47 million homes in the U.S. this year and consumers have become increasingly open to using them for entertainment applications like streaming music around the home," said Jonathan Gaw, research manager for IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice.

The upgraded Opus product line includes a new two terabyte version that doubles the storage capacity of the previous top-end Opus at the same $1799 price and stores almost 6,000 CDs worth of music on-board. Lower priced units are available for smaller music collections.

The latest Olive software increases the speed of the Opus’ touchscreen menu and allows users to search their collections by artist, album or song; add songs to playlists during playback; and personalize Internet radio stations for easy access to favorites.

Olive was founded in 2005 by a team of music lovers with strong engineering and entrepreneurial experience. Since Olive began shipping product in October 2005, its successive generations of hi-fi digital music products have won several awards and critical praise. The company, which has kept a relatively low-profile to date, recently completed a round of venture capital fund-raising to roll out its new product line.

Opus highlights include:

• Music is stored using lossless compression (FLAC) for the best possible reproduction of the original recording, including every tone in the artists voices and individual instruments in vivid clarity
• Sound quality is further enhanced by a high resolution digital-to-analog converter (DAC), optimized circuit design and precision power supply
• Holds almost 6000 CDs so even the largest music collection is all instantly accessible
• Navigation is fast and intuitive through a color-coded touchscreen menu or familiar CD player buttons
• Digitizing music in high fidelity is incredibly easy – either insert CDs into the built-in CD drive and the music is imported and automatically categorized… or allow Olive to do the work for you with its CD digitizing service
• Playback can be expanded throughout the home using the Melody Hi-Fi Multi-Room Player, which connects to the Opus through a wireless or wired network and allows music to be played in up to 10 rooms simultaneously
• Thoughtful design, craftsmanship and high-quality materials – fine grade aluminum exterior etched with distinctive musical genre pattern is stylish, functional (cooling without a noisy fan) and recyclable
• Maestro browser-based software makes music management easy to do – drag & drop playlist creation, metadata personalization and album artwork customization
• Thousands of pre-set internet radio stations are available and adding other personal favorites is easy
• Metadata library is extensive and regularly bolstered by proprietary additions, e.g. only Olive includes such detailed genre-specific information for Classical as Composer, Work, Orchestra, Conductor, Instrument/Voice, Choir, Soloist and for Jazz as Artist, Album, Sidemen, Release Date, Music Label, Instrument/Voice, Original Recording Date
• Opus is not a computer peripheral, so it frees the music experience from PCs or network storage devices and related security/virus concerns
• Set-up is simple, no home installers are required

The Opus No. 4 new two terabyte version and value-added pricing is effective as of August 1, 2009, starting at $1,499 for 500 gigabytes of storage (a $100 decrease over the previous generation), $1,599 for one terabyte of storage (a $200 decrease), and $1,799 for the two terabyte version.