Bluesound Vault 2i - Hi-Res Streamer, Ripper, 2TB NAS Drive - Black

I’ve been looking for a replacement for my philips steamimum for a while and was taken in by the reviews for the vault.The goodLooks goodSounds good with a drawback (see not so good)Good appGood connections on the backThe not so goodSound output level via spdif.Ripping speed a bit slowPriceThe badSpinning hard diskNoiseStand by power consumptionNo ability to turn it off remotelySo it’s not a terrible player, I like it but it has some niggles that are getting to me.The standby power consumption is criminal, It 5 watts. They call it network standby mode. Seriously! Leaving that running 24x7 when if you’re careful your power consumption for your whole house can be down to less than 100 watts. Then not giving the ability to shut it down and even to go as far as saying don’t turn it off, jeezzz do they have shares in power companies?You can go up to the unit and hold down the power button but that’s a faff.The second thing that annoys is the use of a spinning hard disk in this. For the price it really should be a solid state drive out of the box, that would solve the sound issue with the machine itself as well. It would make it quicker and pull less power as well.The Third annoyance is the sound level to my amp via spdif. My amp is high end so it’s inbuilt DAC is pretty good so Digital output is what I want to use, but the output of this compared to the other devices going into the amp is very low. I need to turn up the amp by about 25db to make it a reasonable volume and then switching to other devices and they are unbearably loud. This is a problem that has been reported to their support by other users and there done nothing to fix this. If this was a £500 that would be bad but at over a grand it’s unacceptable.While the Bluesound does have multi room capability that I want I’m moving towards dumping this and going with another solution.I will see what output my Ssd NAS produces and if it’s as good then there may be a Bluesound vault coming to an online auction site near you soon.

My mum taught me that if you cannot find anything nice to say about someone, then say nothing. If I applied this advice to a review of the Vault, this would be a blank space. But, having bought one of these wretched things and selling it after six months, I feel it is my duty to warn others.The vault copies CDs. So does your computer. I have an ancient desktop Mac and even older external HDD. That copied albums twice as fast as the Vault, with the same sound quality, and greater reliability (I found that the Vault wouldn’t copy about 1/7 of my discs whilst the computer copied the lot). The Vault plays digital files. So does a memory stick put in the USB input on my amp or CD player. It sounds the same, and costs more than 50 times less.The Vault has an interface that seems to go out of its way to make accessing information as difficult as possible. Clunky would be a complimentary term for it. A couple of times I found myself so perplexed by the instructions that I contacted the help desk. Okay, Covid was still rampant, but does anyone else think that a tidy number of businesses are using this as an excuse now for cutting back on staff? When I eventually got responses (at least one week late) they provided handy solutions - but to questions I hadn’t asked. I can only assume the regular staff were all ill, and in desperation, members of a local convention for village idiots had been offered temporary jobs.On a good day, the Vault copied one disc every 15 minutes. I had 1.5 TB of data to copy. After several months of increasingly fussy and slow service, I got rid of the Vault. I bought a 2TB Brennan B2 and copied my collection in 3 weeks, with any file types the Brennan couldn’t handle being dealt with by a modest little hi def player. The Brennan is by no means perfect, but using its digital output into a DAC, it gives a very reasonable sound. If you have under 500 GB of music, I suggest you buy a hi def player and rip your cds to it.