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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."
Really... why do I need a "stereo hub"?
I've got a stereo. Is that not good enough?
This doesn't seem like it will be very likely to bring linux to the masses. Anyone who is enough of a technophile to be able to find a use for this thing already probably knows what linux is already.
Really, isn't that all this is? Its a networked mp3 player that looks like a stereo component - because it is, but whats the big deal? It has linux?
What "throne" is it supposed to capture? Networked dvd players do this, plus they play movies. A mythtv box does much more.
For $899 it better deliver my morning toast. I'm all for linux, but isn't the whole idea open source, low cost and "do it yourself"?
Why would I be more interested in that than, say, a $99 Tivo that can stream MP3s, has an accessible UI, and can also record video.
This thing is, in fact, neither a couch NOR a throne nor indeed any form of seating?
qntm.org
...and it's not the one in the living room.
Would it be too much to ask the "editors" of /. to stop posting stories of the form "There is a new device X out there that is controlled by Linux. Look out Microsoft/MPAA/RIAA/TSA/CIA/FBI/DoJ/Apple whoever because they're soon going to 0wnz0r all of your base!". I mean really, the fact that someone has come out with an MP3 player that is controlled via embeded Linux isn't news. It might have been eight years ago, but it isn't in 2005.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Try Squeezebox instead.
Visit http://www.hifidelio.net/ :)
Looks really rather similar
These guys (hermstedt) need a good kicking at the moment because they are up to version 2.0 of their firmware and still have not released source code.
Putting that to one side, I have one of these and it really is rather good.
Wifi has been a term for years, are you just now seeing it?
There's already several things similar to this out there:
j /viadj.asp
http://www.elanhomesystems.com/product/music/viad
http://www.slimdevices.com/
http://www.escient.com/products.html
http://www.request.com/us/
Whats it consist of ? A hard drive , a basic display ,a cheap MB , and a cd rom . Sound familiar ?
It should
Those are all components of an XBOX minus the screen . SO figure a display might cost $100 to implement . How much does an XBOX cost ?
Is it cool?
Yes.
Is it worth $899 ?
NO .
I just bought a laptop from dell for less than that .
The price makes it laughable .
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."
Yeah, but does it run Li--oh wait.... Damn, there goes my post.
Yes, there might not be any benefits to you or most people, which is probably why it is marketed the way it is, but it is not identical to an iPod.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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.
I was about to say, "No, TractorJector didn't write that. It was cut and pasted verbatim from the first sentence of the article. Have the common decency blah blah blah." But hmm, now this is odd. It seems that every Slashdot story that TractorJector has submitted has been a Mad Penguin article by Christian Einfeldt.
Christian Einfeldt, if you are indeed TractorJector or are affiliated with Mad Penguin in some way, please have the monads to disclose in your Slashdot submissions that you're the one who wrote the article. Really, it's okay to pimp your own stuff one the web. Everybody does it now that blogging is the current fashion. But submitting the articles under a pseudonym (especially ones with naive editors, like Slashdot) is just a wee bit underhanded and deceitful.
If you want Linux to win some mindshare, you can't shoot down every company that tries to make money with it.
Consider, for a moment, that it has DA and AD converters that are more than standard. Consider that it can stream to multiple sources wirelessly without having to learn how to use ndiswrapper.
A year ago you all shelled out $600 for an iPod that had color. Is $300 more too much to spend on something that probably sounds better, and may offer many more features for a home sound system?
The big difference between this and an iPod (or most of the other players mentioned by other posters) is that this thing is completely stand-alone, no other computer is required.
This thing will rip its own CDs and provides its own storage. The iPod will provide storage, but you still need a computer to get music into it somehow, be it ripping CDs or downloading from iTMS. Many of the devices mentioned by other posters don't even have on-board storage, requiring a computer set up as a music server.
Not that this is much of an advantage to your average slashdotter, but an non-techie looking for a music appliance might find it very appealing. It remains to be seen if there is much of a market at the $900 price point, though.
They are marketing this as the audiophile's music player, yet no where in their datasheet do they list the signal to noise ratio this thing uses. They also say it has a unique playlist editor, but from what I can tell, it is just a rehashed version of the iTunes interface, complete with "smart" playlists. For $900, this thing seems way overpriced and way under-innovated. It uses industry standard parts; CD-R, 2.5" notebook HD, and most likely a 4x 10/100 PCI NIC. From the sounds of the headline, I was expecting a small form-factor computer that could go in my entertainment center. This is the price of one, but without the actual computer. They say it uses a "lossless" compression, which just turns out to be FLAC. How did this make the front page? I don't even see where it says it runs Linux... It just says it uses a PowerPC chip, and considering how aligned they seem to be to Mac OS X, I would not be surprised to find it running that instead.
today is spelling optional day.
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.
Hm. I agree that Wifi is an incredibly dumb name, but I don't mind the -gate naming convention to indicate a scandal. Obviously it's not logical, but from what I gathered in 4 years of studying linguistics, language isn't logical very often. And with -gate at least I can see where it's coming from, also typically the usage is at least somewhat humorous (as in "Coffeegate" for the recent GTA "issue"). Wifi is just nonsensical, or worse a result from an odd ignorance about the term Hi-Fi.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
You just defined the product in a way that will guarantee that it isn't a mass market winner. No niche product marketed to a select few with arguably better ears and money to burn will ever gain the "couch throne" (or whatever equally ridiculous faux title the article used).
Broadband is analog versus baseband which is digital. The fact that using broadband allows using mulitple channels means that overall, yes, can allow for higher bandwidth.. Compare ISDN to DSL. Baseband ISDN has a limitation due to the total amount of bits it can send (compressed lossless) over very specific channels/frequencies. Broadband DSL on the other hand, converts to analog, sends over multiple channels/frequencies.. More channels means aggregation, plus with higher frequencies, higher bandwidths can be accomodated.
You say that broadband is BROADER than things like dialup.. Dialup is technically broadband, but uses frequencies that are lower and thus do not have "distance to central office" limitations that DSL would have. You simply tradeoff speed for compatibility with almost any infrastructure. Your example is correct in colloquial usage of the word broadband, yet I felt some small clarification was in order.
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