Bluesound VAULT 2i

It's fantastic . Once set up just put your cd in and away you go! Phone app is easy to use too.

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.

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 good Looks good Sounds good with a drawback (see not so good) Good app Good connections on the back The not so good Sound output level via spdif. Ripping speed a bit slow Price The bad Spinning hard disk Noise Stand by power consumption No ability to turn it off remotely So 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.

The Vault works very well and is a good value. It would be nice if it had a SSD. I'm using an optical link into a PS Audio Stellar DAC and the sound is great. Finding Internet radio stations works well too. Initially I liked the product and it performed as advertised. I copied my FLAC cd library to it and set up a couple of internet stations I like and all was well. Over a few months it began to drop the stream. I would have to restart it and this happened 2 to 3 times a day and then it would be fine for several days and then it happen again. After about a year this behavior got worse. after I had it for about 15 months it became very difficult to restart the stream. I could stream the same station on my phone over WiFi but the Vault would not connect. About this time it also would no longer connect to the BlueSound site to perform updates. Then it failed to rip CDs. I looked online and followed all the directions I could find but nothing helped. I contacted BuleSound's support via email and I discovered a new level poor customer service. Absolutely the WORST ever. They will recommend a solution and close the ticket before you can even try it. They kept asking me to re-configure my home WiFi. The Vault does not use WiFi. I finally gave up. I recently contacted BuleSound directly and I'm waiting to find out how much it will cost to return it for a refurb unit. If it's cheap I'll send it in and then sell the exchange unit on Craig's List. In the meantime I bought a Marantz NA6006. It doesn't store music but it has a better interface and sounds great. I will never buy another BlueSound product. A companies product is no better than their customer service and their on-line support set a new low for me.

Malheureusement mon appareil s’eteind tout seul apre 30 minutes e ne fonctionne pad comme prevu J’ai mis beaucoup d’argent et je suis déçu

Genau das, was ich gesucht habe! Endlich konnte ich meine CD Sammlung in einer 1A Qualität archivieren. Das Zusammenspiel mit der Roon Software funktioniert perfekt. Dahinter habe ich ein Yamaha A-S2100 mit B&W Lautsprecher geschaltet, welches ein super Hörerlebnis garantiert.

Rapport qualité/prix imbattable!

I put this device in to replace two Sony CD carousels that had 500 CDs total. Because I had already invested time in ripping my CDs to FLAC format for backup, I was very pleased to find that I could copy all the files from my backup straight to the Vault 2i. And that takes less than 10% of the storage capacity! I have it plugged into my existing stereo system for now, so no fancy wireless multi-room speakers yet. The app works well on our Android phones and Windows PCs. It would be nice if there were a Linux app. I'm not thrilled with the miserable playlist management, but otherwise the app is fine. I have found that the internal CD isn't as resilient when ripping old scratchy disks, but I can rip them on my PC and transfer them over with no problem. I'm very pleased overall with this device.