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Home Entertainment: Olive's 4HD audio system a worthy sequel to the 4 model

Serving Up Higher-Fi

The vast majority of the 4HD is the same as the 4 we reviewed last month.


But that's not to say all. The 4HD lives up to its moniker by offering storage and playback of high-resolution audio files, up to 24/bit/192Khz on its 2 terabyte hard drive. More bits are always good. As are a few cool new features.


As Lauren found in her review of the 4, the 4HD is wrapped is a gorgeous aluminum enclosure with genres of music etched on its surface. Under the skin is the afore mentioned 2 TB hard drive, along with a BurrBrown PCM1792A DAC.


On the back you'll find an HDMI output, which isn't on the 4. This places the Olive's interface up on your big screen for you to navigate, check out track details, and so on.


The small touch screen works well, though it could use to be a little faster, and lets you navigate by layers through genres, artists, playlists and so on.


Functionally, there is little different with the 4HD over the 4, so let's skip to the part that's different and very cool.


Why High Res?

CDs are 16-bits sampled at 44,100 times each second. This is fine, and was pretty cutting edge in the late 70s when CDs were being developed. But these days we can do a lot better. DVD-Audio had more bits and a higher sampling rate and sounded amazing as a result. Technically SACD had fewer bits (a grand total of 1) but a sampling frequency of 2.8 mHz. The result was effectively the same; much higher quality than CD. Play either format back to back with CD, and I guarantee 100% of people would be able to hear the difference. Sadly, most people didn't think they would be able to, hence the deaf of these awesome formats.


Read the Full Review