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Home Entertainment: Olive You So Much



At the risk of sounding clichéd, I’ve discovered there is such a thing as love at first sight.

Your eyes lock on a handsome stranger, a smile creeps across your lips and suddenly your heart begins to flutter. Before you know it, your hands are all over their etched-aluminum chassis and fiddling with their touch-activated screen like a teenager in a parked car with his first iPhone. It’s magical.

And totally hot.

OK, so maybe I was initially attracted by the obviously superficial: the Olive 4 Hi-Fi Server and his cute little brother the Olive 2 Hi-Fi Player are undeniably good looking. Even my perpetually unimpressed male colleagues blurted unprompted comments on their attractiveness. The fine-grade aluminum enclosures are detailed with a minimalist-art-flair: genres of music etched seemingly endlessly across the top surface.

Slim, sleek, silver… oh, but don’t think the sophisticated good looks blinded me completely. To make this romance last, the 4 needed to have some substance as well. I powered it up hoping my heart wouldn’t be broken.

The first thing that impressed me was how accessible the Olive’s operations are: Using the included remote, rubberized front-panel buttons, or touchscreen, the menu is intuitive and easy to navigate. A simple home screen allows you to choose from the stored music library, internet radio, from a separate UPnP-enabled computer on your home network, and, of course, good-old-fashioned CD. Stored music is organized automatically and browse-able by genre, album artwork, name, artist or track. Or, use the search function within each sub-menu and find precisely what suits your mood.

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