Outrageous hi-fi product(s) !

[alcy]

...outrageously priced of course. Looking at products like these I wonder if people actually fall for such crap ?

Check this out: .:: Niveus Media, Inc ::. Tomorrow's Digital Home, Today!

This product called Vail comes from a company named Niveus. They are a known company, but not that popular.

Anyway, its a media server. Have a look at the specs:

-CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo
-Graphics Card: Nvidia 8500 GT
-Sound: Intel HD Audio
-RAM: 2GB
-Storage: 250 GB HDD
-DVD/Blu Ray drive
-OS: Windows with some proprietary Niveus apps
-Standard set of connections etc.

Now, with these components if someone decides to build a HTPC, the price would in no situation cost more than 50k (including motherboard and case). That's also an exaggeration, but lets keep it there.

Right so here's the bomb...the thing is priced at 3,75,000 ! 3 lacs and 75 thousand INR. Abroad it costs somewhere around 5000$.

And friends, this has been reviewed in AV MAX last month....from where I actually got to know about this.

What are we supposed to make out of this ? And gazillion other hifi brands & products out there.

This isn't even funny !

 

[ajinkya]

Here are two more devices, with equally idiotic pricing and low sound/price ratio:

Sooloos: The Meridian Sooloos System : The Experience
Cost is ~$12,000.

Olive: OLIVE | SAVE THE SOUND.
$1500 upwards for a music server that has no interface to TV. So you view, sort, play all your music using a small touchscreen on the device.

There are plenty of foolish people in the world, and plenty of audio products to cater to them.

 

[corElement]

specs look trash to me, 50k is a ripoff, 18k is more like it

 

[santhosh]

specs look trash to me, 50k is a ripoff, 18k is more like it

Point is 3.75 lacs is a rip off. 50k was just a ball park figure considering you need a stylish HTPC cabinet, a BD Rom etc and runs silent at <30 dB. You are looking to build one yourself, am sure you don't get all that at 18k.

Come to think of it, IMO the Vail is way over-speced unless it is also to be used as a PC.

 

[jai1611]

Olive: OLIVE | SAVE THE SOUND.
$1500 upwards for a music server that has no interface to TV. So you view, sort, play all your music using a small touchscreen on the device.

The Olive seems more like a CD player with a storage option than a vanilla music server. If the DAC and output stage are good enough (comparable to a $1k standalone CD player), then it is probably good value for the convenience of being able to rip CD's and keep without bothering with a PC, streaming, external DAC etc. I think Naim has something similar that is much more expensive.

 

[thekinge]

...outrageously priced of course. Looking at products like these I wonder if people actually fall for such crap ?

.................

Right so here's the bomb...the thing is priced at 3,75,000 ! 3 lacs and 75 thousand INR. Abroad it costs somewhere around 5000$.

And friends, this has been reviewed in AV MAX last month....from where I actually got to know about this.

What are we supposed to make out of this ? And gazillion other hifi brands & products out there.

This isn't even funny !

It just goes on to show that there are people who would pay anything to "remain a cut above" the so called cattle class! Doesn't matter if the product they're buying can be bought for a fraction of the price if they can live without the jazz and brand

Having lived in Dubai for a couple of years, I can assure you that there are lot of such people around

 

[soulforged]

This is our chance guys hyeah:

Calling all DIY HFV inmates (kaushik bro long time no c++)

lets bang our heads together and build something for 18K and hawk it for 375K...i can see my retirement approaching head on at high velocity :yahoo:

 

[hemantwaghe]

There was a product called Tetro ,featured in hi fi.
It was essentially a video server with 2 tb storage ,1080P ,don't remember if it had Blue Ray and Hi Def Sound ,with 9 inch Touchscreen and I think touchscreen remote
Priced at JUST 7 Lacks in India!

 

[srramanujam]

Olive: OLIVE | SAVE THE SOUND.
$1500 upwards for a music server that has no interface to TV. So you view, sort, play all your music using a small touchscreen on the device.

QUOTE]

Any feedback on this product, specifically the sound quality.


1500 $ seems not bad, if it combines great sound quality with all these features. In any case a good looking HTPC would come close to 40-45K.

 

[alcy]

^^ Perfect 5 stars given by What Hi-Fi in the previous month's issue, in case that helps.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

They probably expect to sell about six... custom-made motherboard; custom-made case; no economies of scale there. Imagine how much the design and small-run manufacture of a motherboard must cost! On that basis, they may be able to justify, in pure economic terms, the cost. The value, on the other hand, is another matter altogether and, in terms of desirability, this product looks to me like crap! It does not even have a decent soundcard!

 

[thevortex]

All these products sell convenience most of all. That is perhaps their only trump card over the HTPC. Whether this convenience is worth that much can only be a personal decision - that too, after finding out that a similar PC costs somewhere near 50,000 INR.

 

[thevortex]

Hmm...on the Olive I have a question. This is what they have in their website as part of the specification of the product:

Audio Formats Bit rate: 16bits, 20bit, 24bits, Sampling Frequency: 10kHz up to 96kHz (Playback above 16bit only through digital outputs.) WAV, FLAC, MP3 (128 and 320 kbit/s), AAC (128 kbit/s).


What is this thing about playback above 16 bit going through only the digital outputs? With a quality sound card, a PC easily supports playback of 24 bit files. Why is there a limitation here?

And the limitation on the bit rate on the MP3 files is also surprising. Does that mean that if we have some old MP3 files which are 64 bit recordings, they will not be played?

 

[mridulgoel]

Guyz

If you go through the specs and understand the system, this system is priced quite nicely...the competive products like Imerge, MediaMax and Kaleidoscope start from Rs.2.5L same 5000$ US RRPs, and goes upto 12000$ that is Rs.6L...

Actually this system is a Professional Media Server, which provides the Audio & Video Processing and Switching to multiple zones...
Its a dedicated Server with in built 250GB Hard Disk, externally expandable upto 5TB x 2 Max., and can support upto 8 Clients through the Networking Pier...Your clients can be the basic media players of the company that starts from $1400 that is Rs.70,000...But as per our R&D, you can even attach a PopCorn Hour or other good media players with windows environment on it as well, with just a software upgrade...and all the channels will have excess to the storage and will be able to watch different High Def Video with Lossless Audio...

The Network connectivity here automatically updates all the codecs and licenses required(if any, for originals only) to the system, and let you share the data stored within the network...which we normally known as the Album Art / Catalogue with Details...

This product comes with BluRay Player Version 2.0 and has even the capability of upscaling the 480p video to 1080p minimizing the distortion ratio...

Obviously this comes with in built WiFi...

Apart from that, this system can easily be integrated with the Automation Devices through RS-232, which will allow the Playlist / Album ART and navigation through any Room...

So, it will be injustice to compare it with HTPC or products like Normous, Xtreamer, etc...as this and these kind of products, serves a lot of High End solution...

 

[srramanujam]

^^ Perfect 5 stars given by What Hi-Fi in the previous month's issue, in case that helps.

The what hi-fi review has a funny statement that says "the comparison of sound quality with Marantz 6003 was interesting too". Completely avoiding an opinion on sound quality, but they went ahead and gave a 5 Star. Left me wondering.

 

[jai1611]

The what hi-fi review has a funny statement that says "the comparison of sound quality with Marantz 6003 was interesting too". Completely avoiding an opinion on sound quality, but they went ahead and gave a 5 Star. Left me wondering.

Yes - comparing a 2k+ product to a 300 product on SQ seems a bit silly. At the minimum, they should have compared it to a 1k CD player and commented on the differences

 

[santhosh]

Guyz

If you go through the specs and understand the system, this system is priced quite nicely...the competive products like Imerge, MediaMax and Kaleidoscope start from Rs.2.5L same 5000$ US RRPs, and goes upto 12000$ that is Rs.6L...

Actually this system is a Professional Media Server, which provides the Audio & Video Processing and Switching to multiple zones...
Its a dedicated Server with in built 250GB Hard Disk, externally expandable upto 5TB x 2 Max., and can support upto 8 Clients through the Networking Pier...Your clients can be the basic media players of the company that starts from $1400 that is Rs.70,000...But as per our R&D, you can even attach a PopCorn Hour or other good media players with windows environment on it as well, with just a software upgrade...and all the channels will have excess to the storage and will be able to watch different High Def Video with Lossless Audio...

The Network connectivity here automatically updates all the codecs and licenses required(if any, for originals only) to the system, and let you share the data stored within the network...which we normally known as the Album Art / Catalogue with Details...

This product comes with BluRay Player Version 2.0 and has even the capability of upscaling the 480p video to 1080p minimizing the distortion ratio...

Obviously this comes with in built WiFi...

Apart from that, this system can easily be integrated with the Automation Devices through RS-232, which will allow the Playlist / Album ART and navigation through any Room...

So, it will be injustice to compare it with HTPC or products like Normous, Xtreamer, etc...as this and these kind of products, serves a lot of High End solution...

Thanks Mridul for taking time to write so much on these products. I beg to disagree with you on your post. Like theVortex has said, it is about convenience, automation and mostly about snob value than anything else. Most of these features you have listed are quite common and easy to implement if one knows how and spends some time researching it. But then, these products are for the rich and famous and for them time is money. In most cases, they either don't have time to enjoy all this or don't even know how to operate half the things. Believe me, I have seen such people.

If you notice, none of our members have drawn parallels to automobiles brands and values:lol:. So, we can take it that these are priced outrageously high.

 

[mridulgoel]

Thanks Mridul for taking time to write so much on these products. I beg to disagree with you on your post. Like theVortex has said, it is about convenience, automation and mostly about snob value than anything else. Most of these features you have listed are quite common and easy to implement if one knows how and spends some time researching it. But then, these products are for the rich and famous and for them time is money. In most cases, they either don't have time to enjoy all this or don't even know how to operate half the things. Believe me, I have seen such people.

If you notice, none of our members have drawn parallels to automobiles brands and values:lol:. So, we can take it that these are priced outrageously high.

Santhosh

I never said that the price for the product is cheap...
Its sure is Outrageous...
but the consideration out here is in sense when compared to the low end product...
Kaleidoscope, Imerge and MediaMax and now this new brand (sorry cant even remember the name) falls in the High Time Products...
But, yes, you guyz agree or not, i have installed Imerge and MediaMax and have seen Kaleidoscope working...when it comes to Server and Nodes sharing and operating, these products are much reliable...and moreover as they integrate with Automation, so they are more preferable, so you can say the high price fills only these extra parameters...

For eg : i tried Normous, Dune and Xtreamer on Networking...
Xtreamer doesnt support networking...
Normous is dead slow, so by the time, i connected it to two nodes, and tried doing the sync...it automatically dead, and i didnt had patience to do it again...
Dune the setup was done, but it could connect only to one node, and the menu is really boring to operate...
And none of the above has the capability to be controlled remotely or through automation...

I am not sayin that the above are the bad products, even i use PopcornHour myself...but the thing is the Biggies, like everythin to be operated with a touch of button, and its a nightmare for us, if the system hangs, or somethin other happens...so we prefer these highly priced systems...

Thats the reason...

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

But... but...

What, exactly, defines this thing as "high end"? apart from the price? Apart from the fact that it is said to be "custom made", exactly what component on this board justifies its cost being higher than an average motherboard? For starters, wouldn't you expect a media centre to have something interesting in the way of a sound card? Wouldn't you think there should at least be a DAC with the sort of name that people murmur reverently and exchange knowing looks over? There isn't... there is the same intel very-bog-standard sound.

Wouldn't you expect a decent-size hard disk? For a media player? terabytes come cheep these days, and this has ... 250 meg. Oh wow.

Networking? Built in wireless, you say? I don't think so: standard 10/100/1000 ethernet.

In fact... I'm beginning to think I know how they custom make those boards: they buy low-cost PC boards and saw a chunk off! hyeah:



EDIT: Oh, and the final killer is... it runs vista!!!!!

 

[cmsajith]

Its really disturbing on seeing people praising some products as high end based on their price tag and also comparing it with some of the products that are on the other extreme. All those so called highend products are just a simple pc with audio, video, network capabilities which are well configured, nothing more than that. As an IT guy i can say for around 25-30k (w/o a dedicated HTPC cabinet, add a good cabinet for 15-20K and a 7 or 15" touch screen for 10K (rough calculation)) we can have a very "high end" HTPC. Add another 15-20K to make it good gaming rig. I am having a HD HTPC for 13K w/o a HTPC cabinet (for stereo it will be connected to Beresford Caiman DAC and for HT a full fledged HD sound card which can bitstream the HD audio for ~13K). I am also having WD Live which can be networked to this HTPC and a DIY NAS. I dont see any point in spending anything more than 50K for an htpc which is very user friendly as the so called high end players.