Wow, I didn't expect so much interest in this, but here's my thinking...
I was never convinced the Squeezebox platform provided true fidelity across all media types. I could hear a difference between lossless audio played through my Squeezebox feeding my preamp's DAC versus a Disc player playing the same song from a CD also feeding my preamp's DAC. My research suggested that even FLAC was converted to a lossy format on the fly to transmit over the network, but I could never confirm that for certain. I did many single-blind listening tests and made a ton of measurements, and I just didn't find the platform acceptable for my critical listening needs. As such, I never considered it a "reference-grade" solution. So, I used it as a casual listening solution for the convenience. At one point I had four player units in my home and they worked fairly well.
Then, a series of annoyances started popping up:
- I had to reprogram the network settings far too often for my tastes. For some stupid reason they would get all messed up and not connect.
- At one point I had become very fond of playing music from a streaming station from "Jazz Radio" and the provider dropped support for the platform and my favorite streaming channels were taken away from me.
- At strange and unpredictable times one unit I wanted to use would lose connectivity to the server which was remedied by rebooting my host computer and resetting the playback device. Often that process would cause the other units to fail to connect to the server until they who reboot / reset process was repeated.
- The final nail in the coffin was when I got into listening to streaming stations and my entire music collection plus the entire catalog from Amazon Music's subscription service on Amazon's Echo products and installing 8 of their smart devices in my home, most of them connected to high quality audio systems.
I simply stopped using the Squeezebox system as the headaches discouraged me. So, one day I disconnected all my players and uninstalled the server software.
However, I have always been intrigued by the high end music libraries for critical listening as they would meet my requirements for critical listening in my main room. Amazon Echo does not support my needs in that situation, neither did Squeezebox. I had gear envy for those who forked out the big bucks on what I saw as overpriced media player/libraries as I was still playing music on my disc player.
The Brennan device is nearly everything I could want. Plus... and I didn't say this before but it is one of my main selling points, it supports audio via HDMI.
I can achieve my dream of have as few source components as possible with a single streaming player and the music player and nothing else. I don't care about playing BluRay discs (though I may keep a player installed for legacy needs). I could, in theory, run all the my sources through a TV and buy a simple HDMI to 11 or 13 output decoder with volume control, like the Dirac products from miniDSP, and do away with that HUGE preamp. I hate that every preamp which has the features I desire also has to be massive with billions of completely unnecessary inputs.
So, this is an intriguing possibility - I would not be using the built in DAC, but feed my system via Toslink or HDMI. I could slowly introduce my discs to the platform as I get motivated because I could just rip each disc as I desire listening to them. The user interface via the Web UI is incredible looking. That has always been my biggest complaint of damn near every library player out there - like my BD player from Sony which can stream my library but finding an artist, album, or track takes forever with its very clunky UI. I don't have to convert or transfer any of current library which are nearly all in the less compatible WMA Lossless format. That works perfectly for my phone and playing from my PCs, but it doesn't work with many of the new streaming devices. I imagine the developer of the Brennan will add support for DNLA where this library could stream to other compatible players, like smart TVs, smart disc players, and so on.
So, this little unit might solve all my reference grade listening needs in my main rig for less than $700. That's half the price of similar library players I've seen out there which seem to meet all my needs and desires (but which often support crap I don't need like having an overpriced reference grade headphone amp, or strange vacuum tubes in the buffer amp).