brennan

My brother in law bought one to rip his CDs for iPhone use. He has absolutely no audiophile pretensions, and found the whole process very easy. The unit did die after about 6 months, though.

I did take a look at the Brennan B2 and other servers before purchasing the core. It just seemed a bit too amateurish, invented in the shed and a few reviews on amazon were very negative, and these all put me off. 

am tempted to buy to see how well it fares against the four times as expensive Core that I own.

Interesting to see how you get on if you do buy one, it even has an amplifier, so it is incredible value for money. 

An Atom comparison would be interesting as well.

I had a JB7 for a few months. It had to go back to have its CD drive changed and also the power supply failed, but they sent me a new one. The quality of the internal amp wasn't great. It did seem to rip ok and you could leave it on WAV or let it convert to MP3 if you wanted.  The lookup to its internal database worked ok if the CD was in the database, but of course it dated quickly. With the JB7 updating the CD index was a process similar to doing a firmware upgrade on Unitiserve. It didn't have any upnp server or anything like that.

i don't know how the later Brennan compares though.

best

David