For those who don’t know but are mildly curious, a Brennan JB7 is a sound system combining CD reader, MP3 hard drive and amplification system in a small box: see brennan.co.uk/. In December 2012 my JB7 developed a fault – its “Intro Mode” failed. Intro Mode allows one to play the first 12 seconds of each track, normally combined with random track selection. The complication was that the failure appeared to come and go at random. Brennan could not offer a solution, so I tolerated it until the unit failed completely in April 2014. It came back after two weeks working, but with the same fault and a rude note telling me to RTFM, which annoyed me! After much fruitless debate it went back again while I was in Tenerife, and was returned with the same problem. Eventually Martin Brennan himself got involved. He spoke with me for half an hour yesterday and came up with a (messy) workaround. I refined this and sent him the final feedback today: “The problem only arises if one switches the unit off with a brief button push while Intro Mode is engaged. I suspect most people will disengage Intro Mode before switching the unit off. Either way, I find it satisfying that I finally have a consistent picture of what happens, if not why. This also explains why identifying the problem was so difficult – the trigger event is very specific and its effects can be reversed inadvertently”. I’m feeling smug because there are about 50000 JB7s in use and no-one else has identified either the problem or the comparatively simple solution.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 08:55:01 +0000