Brennan JB7 - Revolutionary HiFi - My Review

A personal review by Dave Henniker

I'd seen full page ads for this gadget at the back of the Radio Times and the BBC Focus magazine. At £376 it wasn't exactly cheap but we got some cash from a matured insurance policy so we ordered one. We have a reasonably large CD collection but many weren't getting played because our shelves had overflowed and some discs were in storage boxes.

There were other alternatives such as my iPod Touch 64GB connected to our stereo via a long cable, my Mac Mini (recently relocated to the living room), the Xbox 360, Iomega ScreenPlay etc - or even streaming from our home network. All but the first one would have needed our TV to be on which we found to be distracting from the music.

Reassured by the Brennan website saying Monday 24th January - Now is great time to order because many of our suppliers shut down for Chinese New Year in February so we have attempted to "stockpile" product in advance of the shutdown we looked forward to early delivery.
(I've edited out the long boring saga of emails regarding late delivery)

Eventually it arrived

I can't remember the exact date but I unpacked it and sat it on the coffee table for a couple of hours or more because it felt quite cold and I thought there might be a risk of condensation forming. There was no suggestion to take this precaution but, like Mr Brennan, I too am an electronics engineer and have decades of servicing experience.

I connected the external power supply to the mains and plugged the DC cable into the rear of the Brennan JB7. Nothing happened. There was no display on the front of the machine. Fearing the worst I got my DMM (Digital Multi Meter) and confirmed there was DC coming from the power supply. Naturally I thought we'd been sent a duff JB7 - but then I noticed the undocumented power switch, a small rocker switch at the back of the unit. Perhaps future editions of the User Guide should mention this...

The JB7 was on a glass shelf underneath our TV and was in easy reach of my wife as she was playing Fallout New Vegas on the Xbox. She started the long task of feeding in CDs to be copied to the hard disk. When the JB7 was idle it compressed the copied CDs to the default MP3 setting and naturally we assumed this would work properly. It always had done before whether ripping to MP3 in Windows Media Player, or MP4 in the dreaded iTunes on the Mac Mini.

Incidentally, the JB7 remote control interferes with the Xbox 360. My wife lost progress in a game because of it. I've since put a sticker over the Xbox remote infrared receiver window.

Playing back music for the first time

To our horror we found the music to be hideously distorted and totally unlistenable. Some tracks had prominent bass with no audible vocal (almost karaoke), whereas others consisted of phasey chirping noises. My wife noticed that the 'music' was preceded by a brief squawking noise each time.

I'd copied a few MP3 tracks from a USB flash drive and they played OK. We also found that the first few CDs we'd copied were actually OK too, so after some research (trying every album out of about 300) I found that the following discs had not been compressed properly.

51 Dylan, Bob The Bootleg Series 1961-1991 - Volume 2 20
52 Bob Dylan Oh Mercy 10
53 Bob Dylan Time Out Of Mind [CDA] 11
54 Bob Dylan & The Band Before The Flood Cd1 11
55 Bob Dylan Good As I Been To You 13
56 Bob Dylan & The Band The Basement Tapes (cd 1) 12
57 Bob Dylan & The Band The Basement Tapes (cd 2) 12
58 Karl Jenkins The Journey - The Best Of Adiemus 19
59 Various Chandos - Best Of British 17
60 Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Aldwinkle Bach Harpsichord Reci 15
61 Karl Jenkins Adiemus Iv - The Eternal Knot 14
62 J.S.Bach Toccata & Fugue In D Minor And Other Great Organ Work 6
63 Pachelbel And Others Canon 9
64 Johann Strauss Tales From The Vienna Woods 6
65 Various The Best Of Jazz Classics 20
66 Winifred Atwell The Best Of Winifred Atwell 20
67 Kevin Ayers Falling Up 8
68 The Band Islands 10
69 The Band Northern Lights - Southern Cross { Rec. 1975 } 10
70 Barclay James Harvest Everyone Is Everybody Else 14
71 Barclay James Harvest Gone To Earth 14
72 The Beatles Abbey Road 17
73 Beatles, The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [1987 Rem 13
74 Beatles Let It Be... Naked (disc 1) 11
75 The Beatles Let It BE... Naked (Additional Disc) 1
76 Jeff Beck Guitar Shop 9
77 Jeff Beck Who Else! (1999) 11
78 J.J. Cale To Tulsa And Back 13
79 J.J. Cale Roll On 12
80 Cale, J J Closer To You 12
81 J.J. Cale Number 10 12
82 Cale, J.J. Grasshopper (1982) 14
83 J.J. Cale Travel-Log 14
84 J.J. Cale Troubadour 12
85 Cale, J.J. Okie 12
86 J.J. Cale Naturally 12
87 Cale, J.J. Shades 10
88 Eric Clapton; J.J. Cale The Road To Escondido 14
89 Eric Clapton Behind The Sun 11
90 Eric Clapton Journeyman 12
91 Derek And The Dominos Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs 14
92 The Chemical Brothers Surrender 11
93 Climax Blues Band Couldn't Get It Right 22

I tried using the JB7 to play the Bob Dylan Time Out Of Mind CD directly from disc and it played normally. I tried changing the default compression from 192k to 320k. Before the machine went into idle/compress mode I played back the album from the JB7's hard disk and it sounded fine. We waited about 5 minutes for the machine to compress it at 320k bits/sec and played it back only to find it was hopelessly distorted and unlistenable again.

I then disabled MP3 compression altogether and deleted all the albums as listed above before feeding them all in again. Later I read that I needn't have deleted them; the uncompressed version would just have overwritten the faulty MP3 track. Thankfully we only have about 300 CDs and there's adequate room on the JB7's hard disk.

Making a Backup

Having gone to all this trouble I decided it would be a good idea to make a backup to an external USB hard disk. The User Guide advises it must be formatted to FAT32 which only properly supports up to 32GB. However I connected a 320GB HDD to my PC and used Windows 7 to format using exFAT32. When I connected this disk to the JB7 the display said USB NG which obviously meant No Good. I tried it again with a different USB HDD and got the same message. I thought maybe the JB7 wanted a full formatted disk instead of the Quick Format so I started formatting the first disk I'd tried.

While waiting on the format to finish I browsed the Brennan Help page and read more about compatible disks. I certainly wasn't going to buy a Freecom disk, having had experience of failed USB interfaces and invalidated warranties after breaking the cases open to recover data for customers when I worked at PC World. So I downloaded a suggested formatting utility and it worked.

Pleased to see USB OK on the display I started making a backup early yesterday evening. It's now nearly noon next day and so far it's backed up 2022 tracks out of a total of 3511.

Conclusion

Overall, my wife and I do like the Brennan JB7 despite the above hassles. Getting all the music onto it has, at times, been exasperating. It will be nice to browse through albums using the intuitive controls or the remote control, instead of peering at CDs on shelves or in boxes. Obviously there are issues needing to be resolved. I know that optical discs are quirky things having dealt with them from the beginning and having read about their convoluted evolution via Red Book etc.

PS - Battery

Watch out if you need to change the battery in the remote control. It's not the ubiquitous CR2032 but the slimmer CR2025.