Issues with MultiRoom with Beosound Levels.

[Adam Patane]

Hey all,

I work for a medium size retailer in Australia.

We utilise Beosound Levels at 6 of our stores, and have about 15 Levels across them. Unfortunately, we have been having consistent issues with connections and music from these speakers.

Specifically, loud pops or static will play from the speakers, with music cutting in and out, or straight up refusing to play.

Some speakers are on ethernet, most are on wi-fi. This is an issue unique to our Level speakers, we have some networks with Beosound 2’s and they are near issueless.

B&O support have routinely suggested it may be an issue with mesh networking (which we do not use, we do use Access Points though) or an issue with airplay connectivity/the B&O app.

Is this a common issue with the Levels? Is there something I’ve overlooked to get these speakers to be functional? These speakers look and sound amazing when they work but are such a pain to get working well.

Any advice would be heavily appreciated.

Thanks.

[trackbeo]

Well, support is poking at the right issue this time, because occasional loud pops are what dropouts or delays in digital data sound like, typical of UDP packets spewed blindly on a best-efforts basis.  Playing static is similarly related, and of course so is music cutting in and out, except in that case the speaker was smart enough to cease playing when the data got sparse.

Whether this is related to a networking “edge case” that excites some bug in the Level firmware not present in the Beosound 2, or more mundane networking channel interference and total airtime saturation is “left as an exercise to the reader”.  But there are differences between the boards in Level & BS2, including that the BS2 supports 802.11ax but the Level is only 802.11ac (according to the spec sheets which aren’t totally reliable because: B&O).  AX significantly improves performance in crowded networks over AC.  Might be your case?  Putting the speakers on their own VLAN like you must have done with cash registers and climate control shouldn’t help, because airtime is still finite — but if you’re grasping at straws it doesn’t cost anything to test that and/or switching channels.  I’m assuming that Access Point backhauls are wired, yes?  If you’re doing it wireless, you deserve what you get because latency will be highly variable.  Also “auto” channel selection in any access point is a terrible idea, but you probably already know that.  Nevertheless, check each WAP to make sure one didn’t slip back to that typical default configuration by accident.

Other possibilities are less likely: One thing that probably differentiates you from typical home user is that your Levels are powered up always and playing 12 hours per day.  The other thing that makes you different is the number of speakers running at the same time in a particular store.  So…
If the problem started on all Levels at once where before they worked OK, that would point to a firmware update bug.
If a brand-new Level taken out of the wrap-bag works fine, that would point to overheated old hardware.

But those are unlikely, and I would test first with any of your existing Levels not just on Ethernet cable, but on a cable directly attached to the network/router switch at the core of your setup — merely “on Ethernet” if it’s an aux port on an access point, isn’t enough.  Likewise test it reducing your Airplay group to a single speaker:  You want is to “provide perfect data” to that one Level which was not working, and see if now it does.  Airplay buffering isn’t perfect — I find in my (admittedly low-brow) home Wi-Fi that 3 wireless Airplay speakers (any brand) work fine, 4 is rarely OK, and 5  absolutely causes random rolling drop-outs of 1 or 2 or even 3 speakers from time to time.  (Mixed AirPlay (1) and Airplay2 is also problematic, depending on the source transmitting, but supposedly all the B&O speakers now support Airplay2.)

[Adam Patane]

Hey,

I can confirm, for the stores which use ethernet that it is patched to the router itself through the comms rack. This issue also persists irregardless of network quality as far as I can tell, for example, the same issue persists at retail stores inside busy shopping centres and in smaller, walking streets.

Supposedly, the issue has to do with power. We hang most of the speakers on the wall mounts (bar the ethernet provided few), and they are prone to breaking and providing very inconsistent power, sometimes un-powering entirely for hours if misplaced. I’m looking into different wall mount options now and hopefully that can save the issue.

The airplay buffering shortcomings is a good thing to know. Hopefully the issue isn’t that, as I am unsure of other methods of playing music (maybe USB-C or line in, but some of our levels just cannot be wired together reasonably).

The reason we use our own VLAN is just for ease of control with access points, as when purchased the speakers did not function well with the wifi service we use.

Thanks for the advice, I shall look into more stable internet connections.

[trackbeo]

Ha-ha, seriously, like, “plug it in, dude!”?  That’s even more fundamental than I could have imagined.  But one feature belying such a scenario: The Level is battery-powered!  So in theory you could unplug it and (a) it would take *hours* before it stopped playing, and (b) it would never “cut back in” again!  I don’t have one at hand to test, but color me surprised if unplugging the power brick caused any glitch in the Wi-Fi reception (and thus the music) or analog pops or digital static at the moment of final power death.  But regardless, please let all us Level owners know what you finally discover…  Thanks!

[Author]

Posts