OLIVE MUSICA AUDIO SYSTEM

Got a lot of vinyl records and tape cassettes lying around? Store them on a hard drive. Update your IPOD. Store months worth of music. And do it all with the OLIVE MUSICA AUDIO SYSTEM.

The Musica is designed to replace your personal computer as the home's musical hub. It comes from OLIVE MEDIA PRODUCTS INC. of San Francisco.

It has a 160-gigabyte hard drive that stores up to 40,000 songs. That's about 120 days worth of music. That means you could stay home all winter and part of spring listen to music all day and night and never hear the same song twice.

And it doesn't use a fan, so it's quiet.

Should the thought of uploding 40,000 songs daunt you some,
you can ship all your CDs to the folks at Olive. And when the Musica is delivered, your music will be on it.

The service is FREE for now and at least the next few months, but Olive officials say it's uncertain how long it will be offered beyond that.

It's not so much that this audio system has anything radically new but that it has so much.

"It offers everything in a convenient box -- that's what's so impressive about it," says JOHN ATKINSON, Editor In Chief of STEREOPHILE MAGAZINE. "It's a nice collection of individual, existing technologies, all in one place."

All for $1,099. Atkinson says any other comparable set-up would likely cost from $2,000 to $5,000.

So what else does it do?

You can use it to update your iPod without a computer. Hook it up to a turntable or tape deck, and turn your outdated media into digital music.

And according to Olive's publicity department, it allows you to "actively harmonize the music volume to correspond with a specific atmosphere." Basically, that means it can amplify the quiet parts and keep the loud parts at a decent level.

Check out this review of the Olive Musica System from CNET.com.