The Brennan JB7

I've recently been asked to look at the Brennan by someone considering buying one, as well as by someone who'd like to buy our hard-drive-based music catalogue (at Pristine Classical).

To deal with the latter first: it seems the Brennan device will not read FLAC files - it likes MP3 or entirely uncompressed, but our hard drives, which are filled with lossless FLAC files, are not supported. I'm not quite sure what to tell our potential customer on that front, but it seems somewhat shortsighted not to support the format. By contrast, another recent customer who'd invested in a Linn system was delighted that our FLACs would play back directly in his system.

But ultimately I'm more concerned for the first enquiry I had - whether to buy one or not. It strikes me that the device is simply too locked down - the danger is that it becomes in a very short time the equivilent of a MiniDisc recorder, or worse. It's not clear from what I've been able to find out exactly what happens when the hard drive gets noisy after a couple of years, or what happens when it (inevitably) fails - or even if you just want more space.

I've also made the jump into a CD-free world, but decided to purchase a very small, quiet PC, a pro-quality external sound card, and a 4TB RAID mirrored server accessed by wi-fi. The PC runs XBMC, freeware software which plays just about every audio and video file I know of. The PC's HDMI output sends HD pictures to my TV set, and the sound card plugs directly into my existing hi-fi. It can convert my CDs into a lossy or lossless format, my data is permanently backed up, and any individual component of the system can be simply and easily upgraded if and when required - right now it seems reasonably future-proof. Because it's a PC with a web browser I can of course also use it to stream Radio Three and other music directly from the Internet to my hi-fi system (which is useful as I live in France).

It was certainly a little more fiddly to set up than unpacking a magic box which claims to do it all - but I have owned one of those before (not a Brennan) and, a very few months after purchase, various promised firmware upgrades had been abandoned by the manufacturer, along with any customers who didn't upgrade to their very latest models and ditch the older ones. I don't wish to imply than any other particular company would do such a thing to its customers, just that I didn't enjoy being left out in the cold with a box which didn't quite do everything it was supposed to do quite as well as it should have, and suffered from multiple limitations as a consequence of its design.

(While I'm here, could I ask Gramophone (and Andrew in particular) to consider some kind of comparitive review of high quality external (eg. USB) soundcards for the many people listening on PCs, Macs, laptops and so on? I've found information very hard to come by - as soon as you get very far into pro gear the assumption is you'll want at least 48 input and output channels! I'm personally happy with two...)

I agree with this approach, although I would use dBpoweramp in preference to EAC. I was faced with the same problem (more than 1000 discs to rip), and I'm half-way through. dBpoweramp does help to speed up the process.

I have three Squeezebox devices scattered around the house, so I have access to my music (and internet radio) wherever I choose to relax. This does mean I listen to more music, so for me it was certainly worth doing.

Hi all! hope you don't mind me joining the conversation.

Back up of any music is recomended (how many tapes have we all chewed up and vinyl scratched!) This can be done via an extra hard drive (pc not needed) connected to the front USB, you can also use this for extra capacity as well if you run out of space. Your PC still has hard drives, so possiblity of failure is still there. USB can also be used to plug in a keyboard to edit or add your own or missing info, not all the world to do when your listening or copying, as well as pluging in your mates mp3 or USB drive, again to listen to or copy. Although the Brennan plays cds, its funtion is to play mp3, so better to copy first (2 mins) and then play back. When the unit is in stand by (when your tucked up in bed) it then compresses (3 x rates and uncompressed) You are still able to play the music before its compressed. It all works very quick and smooth. Personally I've got a problem with listening to music on a PC, It's too much faffing about in my view. I've copied 50 cds, (715) songs at 320 and have used up 8.47 Gbs. only another 468.46 Gb to go! Next week I'm going to try loading the old vinyl on to her. Uncompressed first, to see what she sounds like. I haven't tried this yet, apparantly you just plug the deck in. After that, minidisc.

I'd be very interested to hear how that goes. I bought a gadget put out by Nero that promised to do the same, but the software was so unfriendly I couldn't get it to work. Its disappearance from the market since tells me few others could either.