B.S. Node 2i brick (yet another one)


Mine died after 3 years, like so many others, ordered and replaced the caps (they looked fine) and still doesn't turn on. My problem is a bit different - no red light at all on the top, although I may have disabled led's in the setup, and I'm not sure if that setting carries over to bootup.. Anyway, its dead, does nothing, no lights, no network lights at the cable when I plug it into ethernet.

 

This POS BS company will discount me a whopping $75 on a REFURBISHED unit. This is pathetic service for a $600 piece of equipment. I'll never buy another piece of hardware from Bluesound. Audiophile gear priced like that should last 20 years imo. 

What would you guys do? Try and find a full power supply, or do the aftermarket upgrade? My worry is that my power board is fine and its the main board that's bad. I'm not sure how to test this. I did some high level probing on the power board with an electrical engineer, and it looked ok.. Is there a way to hard reset it via usb or something? Does the service button at the back provide any function?

128x128doug1234

I have had an entire house full of Bluesound for the last 5 years and have had nothing but issues with almost all of the units.  BS said it was wifi so I hard networked most of the units and problems persisted. The good news is that after all this time I have finally had zero glitches for the last 2 months. The red light problems were a feature BS added after the 2i came out. It is related to software updates and the units getting hung up. A factory reset will not fix it. Reloading the firmware online or from a usb stick fixes it. Sometime it takes a few tries. I've had 5 devices red light, some multiple times and every one has been cleared by firmware update. I had a new Node2i that red lighted after a couple of weeks and I sent that back before I found out how to fix this.

In my setup, I have found the root cause of the static noise problems, the volume going full on or full off, groups failing to output sound, groups getting out of sync, are all bugs that are related to using the Bluesound App that everyone raves about. Using the buttons on top of the device to select playlists or change the volume causes problems as well. Tried Amazon music and even down graded Tidal to Hifi just to make sure that hires or MQA were not causing the problems. 

Currently I only use the BS App to set up groups and never touch it again, and never touch the buttons on the units.  Tidal Connect is the only app that communicates with the nodes/speakers and we have not had any issues for over 2 months. We used to have some sort of issue almost daily. Any issues that have come up now are Tidal related due to the Tidal app resetting itself  (Tidal does not like my older i devices) and having to reload/restart a playlist. 

The main reason that Bluesound was chosen in the first place was for whole house sound and CD quality. It's taken 5 years to get it to work and only because of Tidal connect. I'm not a huge Tidal fan, but other than Spotify there are no services with a working "connect" feature that I am aware of. 

 

 

Went through factory reset twice. First time stuttered the went to buzzing within a minute. Second time failed to connect to node at all. Wii try again at weekend when have more time

 

Pieter

Hate to see anyone have problems but never read such a long thread for 600 bucks.  Hopefully you get it sorted out.