The Olive Symphony: The mega iPod for your stereo

I did a little research on this piece because it somewhat intrigued me. However, there is IMO a better solution. The Apple iMac w/17" screen via airport would offer you much more for you're money. You also get a Screen, you can place it on you're coffee table or if you are farther away the new iMacs come with remote controls. The price is the same as the Musica and you get the same amount of space, 160GB. I realize with the Musica you do have some free digital radio but with a iMac you can digitally stream ANY radio station in the world. It also has built in bluetooth. If someone had there setup by a TV I could see somebody using a mac mini in the same way hooked up to the TV and controlling it via bluetooth from the couch.

Baroque_lover, the Mac Mini route is the way I went. I've got a massive NAS RAID setup with the library on it, and run iTunes via a Mac Mini with a BT keyboard and mouse.

I'm actually thinking of going another route, however. I figure I can pick up a fanless small form factor PC--something like a Sumicom or Serener XP box--for relatively cheap. I can run iTunes off a windows platform, and use a USB audio output device the way I do with my Mac Mini. The benefit of this route is that I can dust off an old 10" viewsonic airpanel--an 802.11 wireless touchscreen display--and run a remote desktop for the PC--having iTunes control while on the couch in touchscreen form.

This also gives me the option of tacking on some USB/RS232 converters, an IR generator, and running Mainlobby and Girder to consolidate all system control functions on the airpanel. Think of it as a 10" color touchscreen wireless remote with iTunes control...

In the past I've used my powerbook hooked up to my system with a USB audio out with favorable results. I was able to use my cell/pda (Sony Ericsson p910i) as a bluetooth remote using the shareware program Salling Clicker, which allowed me to fully control and search itunes (and even the mouse if I wanted to) via the phones graphic interface/touchscreen. I only used the laptop as a jukebox for entertaining or casual listening (yep, it happens from time to time) and when I install my system in my new house I'm going to get a mac mini as a dedicated music server which I will also hook up to my plasma. I was initially all excited by the Olive, but I think anyone with a little ingeniuty can come up with an acceptible and more customizable solution, albeit not in one box. I think the bluetooth/pda controller option is the way to go for those of you interested.

So with the iMac or the Mac Mini, if you had it at your listening position, what't the overall architecture? Wireless from that device to an Airport Express at the audio equipment rack? Or to a Squeezebox? I get confused about how these various pieces fit together.

Think the mac mini has to be wired into your system (at least your display), so having it with you isn't really feasible.

For the laptops, the theory is that the airport can be used to stream to a DAC, so you would have the airport next to your stereo, plugged into a wall wart and your DAC via coax. The laptop would stream data to the AP wirelessly. Cannot comment on that one, because I've never tried it, but I'm pretty confident on the set up.

The strange part of the laptop thing that I've never liked is that if you run it in conjunction with a NAS (network attached storage), presumably the laptop has to pull data off the network via 802.11, process it, and then push it back out to the airport for routing to the DAC. Seems like the data has to go both to and from the computer via wireless for that to work, and I don't know whether there is enuf bandwidth. Of course, you can always maintain the library on the notebook. I've never wanted to do that b/c I've got too many files. YMMV.

The squeezebox is a thin-client. You hook a squeezebox up to a network (wireless or wirelessly) and also to your DAC. The squeezebox interacts with an application running on another computer on the network (in background mode, generally), which "pushes" data out to the squeezebox based on input from the IR remote that talks to the squeezebox.