Do any fellow Bryston users know how to either (a) contact someone at Bryston; or, (b) do a factory reset on a BDA-3.14 if the web UI doesn’t respond?
I can’t bring up the web UI on my BDA-3.14. I get a blank page, and looking at the HTML source confirms that there’s no content.
I’ve tried posting on AudioCircle and calling Bryston, with no responses either way. Bryston customer service seems to have collapsed completely: you can’t talk to anyone there, you just get to leave a message.
If I could factory reset, I’m pretty sure I’d be fine, but with no web UI, I don’t know how to factory reset.
Thank you, I appreciate that information. I’ll try reaching out to him.
I’ve also been snooping around the filesystem with ssh and there seems to be a script that can factory reset the system. I plan to give that a try if I don’t hear back from Bryston.
I have an older (25+ years old?) 4B and BP26 that I LOVED. The preamp went on the fritz 2(?) years ago. I spoke to him at that time about getting a new preamp and rebuilding the old. The new model was not available (COVID issues). He sent a note to their repair dept asking for repair authorization. I NEVER heard back from the repair even sending a followup note to repair…
Dave was very friendly!
Eventually I gave up and got a Spring 3 KTE dac/preamp for ACT 40As / REL T9Xs.
I wish you luck, Bryston is great stuff.
I was able to repair the situation by replacing the boot microSD card. Here’s the process…I am assuming you are familiar with Linux at the command line level.
Open the BDA-3.14 unit. There are Torx screws on the top and side to detach the top panel. There are (different-sized) Torx screws on the bottom to detach the front panel, which you will need to do as the top panel is slotted into the front panel.
Remove the front panel carefully; it is attached by a ribbon cable to a connector on the circuit board just behind the panel. If the ribbon cable detaches, you can easily re-attach it.
The Pi is at the back of the unit, where the USB slots and the Ethernet port are. The boot microSD card is visible at the front of the Pi, facing the front panel. Remove it from the slot.
Using any Linux computer, make an exact dd copy of the entire microSD disk. You must dd the whole disk device, not just the individual partitions. You can find out the correct disk device using the lsblk command. The disk is 8GB and there are three partitions visible with fdisk: a boot FAT16 partition and two ext3 partitions.
Copy the dd image out to a replacement 8GB microSD card. (Technically, you can dd the original card directly to the replacement card, but you might not have two SD card readers and it’s worth keeping a copy of the disk image as a backup for future use.)
Put the replacement card into the card slot of the Pi in the BDA-3.14. Reverse the process of opening the device to close it back up, then reconnect and boot.
Now that I’ve posted a hopefully helpful post, let me add another post here.
I paid over $4,000 USD for this Bryston BDA-3.14, and it is still under factory warranty. Two calls to Bryston and an email to their support division went unanswered. I have yet to actually get any response from anyone at Bryston. Were I not a software engineer with considerable Unix and Linux sysadmin and devops experience, I’d be still sitting here waiting for someone at Bryston to call.
Bryston could justify their high prices because their support was exemplary. I myself have experienced that support, which is why I bought a Bryston streamer. Under the new ownership, support seems to have been deprioritized, and there is no longer any justification to pay Bryston’s prices. While a power amp may not require much support, a digital streamer built on a Linux platform is absolutely going to require support at some stage.
Personally, given this experience, I will never again buy a Bryston product. If I need a streamer, I can get a Ropiee Pi3 or Pi4 and hook it to a Benchmark DAC3 DAC. I have a Benchmark power amplifier, and when I’ve contacted them for routine support, I have been put in touch directly with John Siau, their chief product designer. Bryston used to be like that, but sadly no more.
Thanks, Robert. I did post in Audiocircle but unfortunately got absolutely no response. I actually got several more responses here in this thread, including yours (thanks again).
When you call Bryston, you can’t speak to anyone. You can only leave a message. I did, twice, but no one called me back.
I was able to fix the problem myself, but only because of my professional experience in software development and systems administration. If a hardware problem had occurred, I’d have to junk it during warranty. My dealer went out of business during Covid.