The Brennan JB7

I have had one for about 3 months - largest memory.

I have about 900 cds on it - mostly uncompressed.

I think it is absolutely brilliant, but I had to send it away for 4 weeks (!!) after something shorted when I was plugging into Audiolab amp.  Accompanying notes/booklet are/is a bit too brief.  No warning about having everything switched off at all times when faffing about - most people should know this, though.

Whoever says the scrolling to find items is tedious clearly does not understand that you can "search" and sometimes the first 3 or 4 letters you key in will reveal what you are looking for.  doh!

Exciting to play "random", though, all those tracks you never bothered to play over the years pop up and you realise, "Hey! this is good, I've been missing out".   Elgar followed by Chuck Berry, then Lionel Hampton - very stimulating, the surprise, the anticipation!

Now connected to new Roksan Kandy 2 and B&W 603s and I can hear no noise whatsoever that should not be there on playback - as clear as you could wish for!

Why anyone should say do not get it, I cannot understand.  I have been into hi-fi (not audiophile - it's the music that matters) since 1970 and still have the "Which" recommended Thorens TD 150/II I bought that year.  Everything else has been replaced two or three times over the decades, but I have to say, the JB7 is a milestone in listening for me.

About 900 CD cases have gone and the CDs are stored in 2 flight cases bought in recent sale at Maplins for £20 each.  The CD sleeves/info has been filed in alphabetical order in 2 small wooden trays I made.  This can be improved upon, I dare say.

Oh, Brennan emphasis the importance of backup, so the scare stories about "discs not lasting forever...." etc should not concern you if you have bought the Buffalo 500GB disc and copied all you stuff onto it.  Seemed to take about a fortnight, though, running night and day!!

Well, it seems to me that the Brennan JB7 is a custom device for the older generation who wouldn't have the tech savvy to work out their own solution with a combination of PC work and mediacenter gear. So I couldn't knock it, because I think we all know it's nigh-on impossible to get many older people to adapt... regarding alternatives, although I don't know a custom one, I have seen touch-screen monitors even in supermarkets and I would prefer this with a mini format PC. I don't know enough about audiophile soundcards to comment on that.

Brennan might have thought of FLAC/M4A/APE/WV lossless formats as neither here nor there, but I think he will be forced to rethink this very soon.

Bit patronising to us older music lovers that last but one.  I am 65 and have been working with pcs, photos, etc since the early 90s when the technology was given to us by our employer whose products are all generated by the most powerful computers in the world.  Younger people will also find it is difficult to learn totally new ways of working when they are in their early to mid- 50s.

Anyway, I like the Brennan as I am fairly open minded about new technology - except compression. 

Mention has been made of "lossless".  Is totally uncompressed - which is what the JB7 can do, and in which format most of my CDs are on the Brennan, lossless?  The blurb tells us that this will give a true copy of the original CD.

Thanks for that, John - most informative.

I agree, the small percentage of albums I recorded at "the most slightly compressed" (I forget the rating) are good for listening to.

Many of us grew up in an era of listening to music firstly, in the 1940s and 50s as children, on "Medium Wave" via the "wireless".  We then aspired - as we nearly all got jobs then - towards 1960s "hi-fi" where purity and the best possible reproduction of the recording was the target.

Many of those of the next generation after ours may not have heard the following about listening to the radio prior to about 1965.                        MW radio for years had irked millions of listeners with problems like (i) fading signal to almost nothing when your favourite single or concerto was being played (ii) interference from electric appliances like your mum's, or next door's hoover or (iii) interference from most vehicles when they went past your house (spark plugs!) - really loud!! and (iv) background hiss from millions of other sources (v) mono - but that was OK really when you had known nothing else.   My God!  How did we manage!

It is difficult, therefore, for many of my generation to sacrifice "digital space" for quality, even tho' the difference may be inaudible to most human ears.  Just knowing that the music has had something removed is enough for us to want to reject it!  It is like a backward step.  We prefer it "wi' nowt tekkin out" now that technology had given us our first peak in quality a few decades ago.

We do not want to relinquish it for new fads driven by the need to keep selling gear to the masses who can overlook quality for convenience and the need to be "cool" at all times.  However, it has to be said that even we were seduced by the convenience (and apparent improvement of sound by having got rid of vinyl surface noise) of the compact disc.

Going back to quality, I have used reel-to-reel a lot from 1966, and nearly always used 7 and a half"/per second speed - having closely listened to 3 and three quarters and 1 and seven eighths and heard the loss of quality at the slow speeds on a mid-range Tandberg.  You only got 45 mins each side of tape at that speed.  Noisy 1960s and 1970s parties meant, though, you could play a 3 and three quarters speed compilation at 90 mins per side.  Horses for courses.

The quality of reproduction from the microengineered cassettes where, say, TDK SA (without Dolby) runs at one and 7/8ths on a very good (Nakamichi, TEAC) or even a not-too-old budget consumer cassette deck is a different matter altogether as far as "hifi" magnetic tape goes.

So, at the moment, it is fun for me to faff about with reels of tape made as far back as 1976 by playing them on an early 1960s Akai 1721 through a 2010-purchased Roksan Kandy, or to record from the Brennan on to a good cassette to listen to the music via a digital to analogue medium.

Things are technologically very different in each era, but newer and different does not always mean better without question.  Embrace all the media, I say, but you can guarantee that as long as the reproduction of music is discussed, honest opinion, prejudice and bias will always be present in good measure - and thus it has been so for around 50 years, I would say.  

Regards to all and "listen to the music".  

Like a number of others, I am very concerned about the access to my music files via the Brennan's system and have more or less firmly decided against going for one.

Following advice in earlier posts on this Forum, I have bought dbPowerAmp to rip my CDs and will then set up my files of music by Composer, which is what the Brennan doesn't allow easily.  I plan both to store my files on my computer and back them up onto a Hard Disk.

I am then thinking of using the Squeezebox Duet to play my files, but I have a slight concern about the ability of the very small Duet Controller screen to allow me enough space to "see" my filing system and thus allow me to find the music I want.  Can anyone with a Squeezebox system answer that?

One other question. What format and compression should I use to make the files good enough to listen on my "reasonably good" (but not state-of-the-art) amplifier and speakers.  If I had been using the Brennan, I would have gone for 320 bits/sec.  This kind of description doesn't seem to be offered on dbPowerAmp, which offers Flac, MP3, Wave and some others.  Which should I choose?

Thank you, SpiderJon.  That answers pretty well everything, and I am on the point of ordering a Squeezebox Duet. 

But it leaves me with one minor question.  When I contacted Logitech to ask about what the controller screen shows (because the user documentation is very sketchy) they told me that the controller only "sees" albums or Artists and cannot be instructed to look for composers.  So I am thinking of filing my ripped music putting the composer into the "Artist" position, so that the Squeezebox will "see" composers, which is what I prefer. 

Is this nonsense? 

That's very helpful, SpiderJon.  I now have a  Duet on order and will find a way to suit my own needs, using your links.