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A Serious Contender for the Couch Throne
TractorJector writes "It is no secret that the competition for global domination in the operating system market has moved from the desktop to the living room couch. The Olive Symphony, a Linux-powered hi-fi wi-fi stereo hub, stands a decent chance for a prime position before the living room throne."
This thing is designed for classical music. It is specially tuned so that it plays the classical music at prime quality, rather than the crap MP3 quality which classic music puts out.
It is not aimed at the open source community, this is for the picky old rich folks who love their music and want to be able to listen to it at full quality. The main reason you can tell this is because they offer a service to rip your music for you. This is not for the average home user, much less the average geek.
Try Squeezebox instead.
Actually there is a sizable market for classical music playback equipment, in the ultra-ultra-high-end. Many audiophiles (who really are just people with lots of disposable income and who think they have better hearing than anyone else) like classical music and jazz. Whether they become audiophiles out of an actual appreciation of classical and jazz music, or whether they like classical and jazz music because they're some of the only recordings which really sound much better on a serious high-end audio system, I'm not sure. If you read Stereophile or some of the other mags like it, it becomes clear that the tail wags the dog in a lot of areas ... people spend thousands of dollars on a stereo, and then go out and hunt for discs that actually have enough detail in the recording to sound better on them.
But the audiophile market is incredible fickle, and I'm not sure whether a product like this would do well or not. (Although Stereophile did pick the iPod as one of its components of the year a while back...) Maybe if it was designed to work with huge volumes of uncompressed high-resolution music data, they could carve out a niche for it. But otherwise, and until somebody comes up with a way to rip SACDs and DVD-As, who cares. Also, the lack of a digital-out for use with an outboard DAC will probably lose them points in a review.
Anyway, just my thoughts. The hifi audio world is a pretty strange, sometimes twisted place (where else can you spend $500 on a 3-pin IEC power cord?), and I don't think these guys are entering it correctly if they want to succeed there.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Okay, I don't mean to be a dickhead. Lord knows people have trashed this thing enough. But as a web/graphic designer looking at the site, I feel I have to comment...
...and I'd start putting "Mac only" at the top of every page, or you're going to be getting a lot of returns.
First, if you're going to have the "gigantic photograph" style of web design, for god's sake don't scale your photos up. It looks terrible, blurry, and amateurish.
Second, if you're also going to do the "lines" thing, for everyone's sake pick a program that can do decent antialiasing. Your lines looks like a pixel orgy on my LCD.
Third, as I know both of these elements seem to add up to "audiophile" site material (look at the Linn Audio site), which is obviously what you're going for, but even Linn knows not to make a site that requires 1024x768 maximized to view, especially since your software is Mac only. On the Imac I'm currently using, your "My Account" link looks like "My Ac".
Fourth, how about some real info on the product? I had to go through a few different scenes of your flash tour in order to find out that it could pull music from Mac and PC. Even if the playlist software is only for mac.
Fifth, on the Sonata Shots, please PLEASE at least blur the text you've overlayed on top to make it look like it's really part of the LCD. It's such an obvious photoshop job it's not funny.
Sixth, the icons you're using for the technical sheets for the thing are fuzzy and barely visible in the overall design. On top of that, putting the mouse over them doesn't reveal any kind of title or tooltip that would let a user know what they do. Really, just put the text somewhere, or at least make them a similar contrast to the text so we know they're important. They just look like more useless decoration.
And last, the "different colors for different buttons" thing usually points to a color scheme for the different parts of the site or at least some kind of relevance. It's a nice visual cue. But on your site the colors are just random. Nothing makes sense. They even repeat nonsensically between different sections.
The whole site reeks of imitation without understanding.
Honestly, do what you're going to do. Make your product. I wish you success. But spend some money on a decent graphics person if you're going for the high end like this. Especially if your product is mac only for the software side.
vk.