Brennan
Posted by: Mdt1927 on 19 June 2017
Considering getting hold of a Brennan B2 in order to load up my cds. Was hoping to link this up to my Mu-so. Is this possible? If so what's the best way? Cheers
Yes - just connect the Brennan to the Muso via an optical toslink cable.
If you're looking at something to be able to rip and store your CDs and allow your Muso to play back these ripped CDs then something like a Vortex box would be better (Google Vortexbox UK) as the Brennan is really more of a self contained, single room storage and playback device (it has internal amps and speaker outputs). I don't think it is is designed to serve music over a home network to other devices.
A Vortexbox (or similar) will allow you to rip and store your CD's and contains a built in UPnP server which makes the stored music on the Vortexbox available to other devices on your home network such as your Muso.
James
Before you rip too many CDs into your Brennan, it would be worth doing it in WAV and also MP3 and listening to the difference. Then you can decide whether you want to store them as MP3s or WAVs. (The WAVs take up a lot more room but unless you have thousands of CDs, that doesn't matter.)
i had a Brennan JB7 for a while and it was discovering the staggering difference in sound quality between an album ripped in 320 Kbps MP3 and the same album ripped in WAV that led me into Naim in the first place.
best
David
I'm sure a Brennan would work fine for this, although there is a lot of redundancy if you're only using it's ripping and storage facilities. I'm not sure that having a power amp inside the same small box that houses a CD drive and hard drive is ideal. A friend of mine used one to rip his CDs, and it worked OK but was rather slow. It also died after 6 months use as a player.
If you just want something to rip and store CDs, I think I'd prefer a regular NAS myself.
My Brennan also died after about 6 months, but their afterservice was exemplary; think Naim-type of responsiveness but with the added benefit of the customer being able to track the stages of the repair by on line access to Brennan's service dept IT system.
best
David
I built a vortexbox and it is excellent. You can also buy it as an appliance. I use mine with minimserver for audio and plex for video. Highly recommended.