Unitiserve, or streaming ?

Posted by: Jim Roffey on 02 May 2016

For the past 3 years i have been using an Olive 4 HD with a 2 TB hard drive, i have almost 2000 albums on it that i also have in a separate external HD. this took me over 6 months to do. The Olive has been nothing but trouble, when it works it is great, but it doesn't work very often the back up from Olive in the USA has been non existent. i have a decent amp and speakers  and am looking to replace the Olive, i am unsure whether i can utilise the flac files in any new machine and the more i look at different options the more confused i get. my local dealer has recommended the Naim Unitiserve saying i can just connect this via an optical lead to the amp load my flac files go, it would also give me the option of burning my new CD's another retailer who sells both Naim and Linn says the Linn DS Majic and separate HD would be a preferable option and sound much better. so i'm pretty confused as to how to proceed.  am anxious to avoid a costly mistake again as the Olive was a wasted  and expensive venture,so  whether to go for a Naim streamer, Linn streamer or just a unitiserve, and what to do with my existing CD collection. 

Posted on: 02 May 2016 by Bart

I read up on the Olive 4, and it looks like it rips cd's to industry standards (flac or wav).  Which did you select?  In any event, it seems pretty certain that you would NOT need to re-rip your cd's.  But depending on how the Olive handles the metadata (tags) that are part of the music files and contain the ARTIST, TRACKNAME, etc data, you may need to do some cleanup on that.

Now that you've ripped all/most of your cd's, you might consider just a basic nas instead of a UnitiServe; you don't need the ripping function.  Just get all of your files off of the Olive and transfer them to a nas.  Get a QNAP nas and run Asset music server on it; you'll be all set.

Posted on: 02 May 2016 by Jim Roffey

Thanks for your reply, i saved them to FLAC , i'm glad i asked the question as it looks like a streamer would be the better option, with my music loaded onto a qnap.

Posted on: 03 May 2016 by Solid Air

Yes, I agree with Bart. Copy your FLAC music files on to a QNAP NAS with Asset, and it will work very well. You may need to clean up the metatags.

Personally, I didn't love the Linn Majik DSM at all. It's nice . . . if nice is what you're looking for. For a little more money you can get a SuperUniti which is massively better to my ears. It all depends what you like . . . 'nice' just doesn't do it for me.