Brennan B3 (2TB Black) Hifi - Hard disk CD ripper & recorder, storage and player with Bluetooth, Compatible with Sonos, Internet Radio, Stereo Power amplifier, NAS, Wav, Lossless (FLAC) and MP3.

Product Information

The Sonos will then spend quite a few minutes a ridiculously long time indexing the Brennan B2 - don’t worry it doesn’t do it every time. Make a cup of coffee. If you have a lot of music make a meal. You can tell its doing something if you listen to the B2 you can hear the hard disk head moving. B3 lets you compress these WAV files into FLAC files. FLAC files are about 60% of the size but there is no loss of information so the process is reversible. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Compression. And Lossless refers to the fact that there is no loss of information. Many of the JB7 and B2 design decisions followed naturally from the decision to be as small as possible. The biggest difference is the hardisk memory capacity. The x-14 can take up to 8 TB, whereas the Brennan only about 1-2 TB max. And the cheaper models of the latter only use SD memory cards, which to me seems like a rip-off. Yes you have to buy the disc or sshd on the x-14 separately and install it yourself, but its very easy, and the company will walk you through it. To me it was worth it. And the price is cheap for 1-2 TB. And if you want to increase later, you can import the pre-existing DB. You cant do that with the Brennan.

The new BBC HLS system will give you access to higher quality music. I understand they use 320k AAC. Displays the current Wifi signal strength. The readout uses negative numbers so -40dBm is better (stronger) than -50dBm But B3 has become my favourite. Sure it takes up more space on my desk but the display is just so right - I’m looking forward to working with owners to do more with the display.

Sonos

The queue mechanism leverages the playlist functionality so you will see it creates a temporary playlist called Queue. This is the most requested function on the forum so let me know what you think and let me know of any side effects. I could not really find a way to fit a colour display. I needed a letter box shaped display but colour displays usually have a squarish TV shape.

Day 8 after ripping 350+ CDs, content is present in the Web UI but fails to play or display album art, attempts to update result in "waiting for disk" message and the content disappears from the UI, when attempting to play from the device itself, there's no content listed at all. New Recording facility on the original web UI - better control over record from internet radio. And now it also records from Bluetooth as well as the forthcoming Brennan ADC. B2 and B2B have both been updated to include the new Radiofeeds list and the change to the web UI presets panel. After upgrading the software you should load the new Radiofeeds list using Settings > Radio Update Get into the menu by pushing the volume knob. Turn to select an item. Push again to choose that item. I'm pleased to say that vTuner have added support for the new BBC streaming mechanism (known as HLS). This necessitated a bit of a rewrite in the Brennan code. I have today released new code for B2B. Please let us know of any difficulties. I aim to release code for BB1 and B3 next week.This only shows if there is a USB memory device - like a USB hard disk plugged in. Starts the USB Menu