The Olive Symphony: The mega iPod for your stereo

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.

Thank you, very helpful.

I'm not a fan of proprietary boxes, but ran across an announcement those of you looking at the Olive might be interested in--their new "Opus":

http://www.olive.us/p_bin/