Brennan B2 480GB Black Hifi - Hard disk CD ripper & recorder, storage and player with Bluetooth, Youtube, Internet Radio, Stereo Power amplifier, NAS, Wav, Lossless (FLAC) and MP3.

I bought this unit specifically to enable me to play my CD collection on my Sonos speakers around the house. I am very pleased with the product and would certainly recommend it. Pros and cons listed below:ProsLinking it to my Sonos speakers was seamless. I went to follow the instructions as to how to do it and found that the unit had already done it! There were my various room definitions in a neat list ready for use - excellent.Rips fast and accurately. I have ripped 325 CDs so far and have only hit issues with 3 (all CDs with bad scratches which the Brennan gave up on but which my CD player plays two of them). The ripping is also faster than other reviews have said. I am seeing 10x an 12x speeds quite frequently. I wonder if this is because I have an SSD rather than HDD version?Very good sound. I can hear details in the recordings I was not hearing on the same speakers before from a decent CD player connected to the same amp and speakers as I use for my Sonos in the living room (via a Sonos Connect).Ripped CDs are immediately available with no compression applied. When the unit is inactive for a while it automatically starts compressing recent additions (using FLAC by default) and will immediately stop again if you ask it to play something. The compression is, as the name suggests, loss less but you can use other, more harsh compression if you want or turn of compressional together. The 325 CDs I have ripped so far are using 108.18 Gb leaving enough space for the remainder of my collection on the 480 Gb SSD version which is what I have. I tend to rip a big batch of CDs (50+) and then leave the unit on over night so it does all the compression then.Happily plays different music in different rooms at the same time (but see below).Automatic CD and track naming on ripping works well. I have only had 12 CDs not recognised and they are mainly very obscure and quite old. Baffled by the 2 CD box set where the album and tracking worked for the 2nd CD and not the first however! Just watch out in case the automatic matching has found more than one option. If it finds one and only one listing to match your CD the display on the Brennan shows " 1 {CD Name}". It shows exactly the same message if it finds two possible matches with nothing extra to note that more than one has been found. You need to read it, note it isn't what you were expecting and turn the dial on the unit to find the second match.Editing missing album/track information is very easy in the browser (but see below).As I listen to a couple of radio stations as well I was very pleased to find them (and loads more) already listed under the Pre-sets in the browser. One click and I was happily listening to my favourite stations.ConsWeb interface lacks a way to set up a queue of tracks. You can set up a temporary playlist and get around it that way.The index could really do with a genre attribute. I have a lot of Classical CDs and I would really like to see them in a separate genre selection to my modern music and blues CDs. Again, the work around seems to be to set up a playlist called Classical and put all the CDs in it but it is clumsy.The Brennan sometimes 'disappears' from the web browser, i.e. the device is on but the browser cannot find it. The solution is the old off/on.The Brennan sometimes (very infrequently) hangs on boot up. Off/on solves it.I cannot convince Sonos to use the Brennan as a NAS despite following the Brennan website instructions. This is a shame because Sonos being able to access the entire library directly would presumably solve the queue issue mentioned above. (I can play music on the Sonos set up easily from the Brennan browser and app but the controls when you look in the Sonos apps are restricted to play/stop and volume). I need to speak with the Brennan support people but haven't had a moment to do this yet. There may be firewall or similar issues due to my computer security settings which I do not really understand.Response to the volume control on the browser is slow, lagging by 2 or 3 seconds.The unit defaults to playing on the speaker outputs and there is no way to reset this. I do not have any speakers connected to it. I have to remember to select the room I want music in before selecting the music.When you edit track and album names (where they weren't filled in automatically) the browser UI converts '?' to '-' which is a bit annoying.If the automatic album information process does not pick up the album art you are offered two locations to find it, Amazon and some other public album database. I have been unable to find anything useful on the other database. The Amazon DB search is frustrating. For some reason it is not restricted to CDs or Music and only returns a limited number of options. When I looked for Guys and Dolls (the musical) recently I was offered images of dolls from the toy section! I have read some Q&As on how to load art but have not tried it as yet.

I thought for a long time and did a lot of research before buying the Brennan B2. If you're reading this for that reason, you've come to the right place and should read on. My conclusion is that I really like it, you may too, but it may not be for everyone.When I first discovered the B2, while looking for options to rip my 700+ CDs for digital storage and playback at the original quality, I loved the Brennan website and the company's obvious commitment to customer engagement and continuous improvement of the product. Also, the design and concept of the B2 were deeply impressive. On the other hand, I saw mixed reviews on Amazon.com and elsewhere and even the company's online Forum seemed to throw up a multitude of technical glitches and problems. But was that because the design is flawed or because the company is genuinely open and active in dealing with issues and resolving them?Anyway, I pulled the trigger and bought the B2 on Amazon. I was careful to order the right optical cable at the same time (toslink to mini-toslink, easy enough to find but you're not likely to have one lying around at home) as I'd read that I needed it to link the Brennan to play through my hifi at the the highest possible sound quality. So my first bit of advice, if you're tempted to buy a B2, is make sure you do enough research and work out exactly how you will use it. The Brennan website and Forum are the places to go. As well as needing the optical cable, I knew I wouldn't be connecting speakers direct to the B2, but the fact that it has the facility to drive speakers, and thus be a self-contained music system, is interesting and, again, impressive.I'm now about a week in and, so far, I love this little box. It does have its quirks but, for me at least, they somehow add to the charm. For example, it decided to rip only 6 tracks out of 11 from one of my CDs, but I tried it again and it was fine. I've ripped about 50 CDs so far and here's another tip: it's best not to do too many each day, maybe up to 20, as the B2 needs a lot more time after that in standby mode to compress everything to the FLAC format, if that's what you choose, which retains the quality of the CD whilst taking up less space on the hard drive. The results have been excellent: the B2 recognised all of the CDs, named all the tracks and generally found the album art automatically. In a few cases I had to find a picture of the album cover and load it manually from a laptop, which is very easy. That's not a Brennan issue, it's my fault for liking a lot of less well known stuff. The Brennan "User Interface" (it isn't technically an app, though they have those as well) is very well-designed and lets you edit your library of albums, artists and tracks, create playlists and so on...as well as playing the music of course. You can, if you must, work everything from the control panel on the unit itself or from the tiny remote control, though I think personally the latter is the least impressive feature of the package. Next, a quick mention of two more excellent features: first the Internet Radio. I have it on my hifi but have never bothered with it, it seemed too complicated. On the Brennan, it's really easy to find stations and save them as presets. Secondly: Youtube. Who thought of that? Genius. Obviously there's no video, but you can search and select from the hundreds of thousands of Youtube musical items and play them through the B2 at the same high quality as the CD rips (assuming the Youtube original is at least that good, of course).What does the B2 sound like? I've been exploring higher resolution music for a few months now, buying some favourite albums at far above CD quality, so I like to think I know good sound. I've also been a performing musician most of my life and spent a fair bit of time in recording studios. I'd say the B2 does what it says: rips CDs and reproduces their sound without any difference in quality, direct from the hard drive. So it's as good as what you play it through. I've concluded that CD quality is good enough for me, most of the time, and the B2 delivers it really well. That said, I don't know what its internal amplifier sounds like, or the Brennan speakers designed for use with the B2. But running it direct to my hifi system is more than fine.I'm still exploring what the B2 can do and think it will keep me amused for a long time. Next step for me, as I continue to rip and organise the CD collection, is to try out the NAS function. This will allow me to link the B2 to my laptop so I can use it to add music to, and import it from, the B2 hard drive, making the Brennan, in effect, like another drive on the computer. At the very least, I'll be able to use the laptop as a backup to what's on the B2, though it also seems easy to back up the music library direct to an external hard drive via the B2's USB sockets.Hopefully if you're a doubter, as I was, this review will help you make up your mind about the B2. Your experience might be different to mine, which is overwhelmingly positive. Also, there are cheaper ways to rip music from CDs and store it digitally, then play it back. But I've seen nothing as elegant, even at double the price, or which integrates so neatly, visually and functionally, with a hifi system.

Everything worked very well except headphone play back. Bluetooth to my Sony HPhones superb !...CD playback...Great!...CD ripping v, fast...internet radio...great ! Bluetooth pairing superb! Menu options far better than DB7 but still on generic menu so no need to re-learn.All I need now is to save up for my Sonos speaker!Needed to think a bit about how to name CD's that were not identified on the DB...I have a techie blind spot here.

Best thing I ever bought. I love my music and this makes it so easy to listen as I move around he house. Stops me worrying about losing my CD collection.Just a pity its 24volt. 12volt would have meant it could be mounted in the motorhome or even the car.