Music servers are becoming more popular but still pricey.  You could always go the way of the home made PC and just wire it to your audio system, but it sounds like crap.  There are budget ways to stream digital media to your HT system that don't include any local storage like Sonos and Squeezebox. The idea of a music server that has the build quality of an audio component is very appealing.  There will always be the high end stuff priced in the stratosphere and it looks like Olive’s Opus is going to be one of those pieces of equipment.

The $1300 Cambridge Audio Azure 640H has long been the most appealing music server I’ve seen yet.  It strikes a nice balance between price and quality. 

If you’re able to spend the extra money, upping the lean size of the 160HDD on many of the middling music servers (including the Azure 640) is definitely the way to go. 

Olive is an American company that specializes in next generation CD / server players designed for a home audio system.  The Olive Opus is the company's magnum opus.  At $3000 US you get truly hi-fi audio quality and a 400Gig HDD.  Nice.

The Opus will digest your CDs using its lossless compression format, allowing you to store up to 1100 albums.  For the truly fussy audiophiles it will store uncompressed CDs but then you only get up to 660.  Still, that’s a nice collection of CD music stored at its original quality.

As a CD player alone this unit designed with hi-fi audio appeal.  Four 24bit/96kHz Burr-Brown DACs, independent power supplies for analogue and digital sections of the circuit boards contribute to high end sound.  But it’s not just a CD player, you get wireless connectivity with 802.11g so it can stream music to another device in the house.  Using Panasonic’s CD-R/RW it’ll even burn music CDs for you.  The Olive Opus even has analogue inputs so you can have it record from any analogue music source.

A high class piece of gear for a high end consumer who doesn’t mind spending three grand on a single component.  Count me out for now, maybe when the price comes down severely.  Until then I can dream can’t I?