For me, an interesting new feature is the play queue. Rather than chosing a song to play now, you can add it to the queue. It makes sense.

True but how many parties or events would you host to make this feature worthwhile? Random already achieves this allbeit a little tedious but you can still achieve a similar result, just wasting a little more of your time!

I can see the appeal but I am still disappointed that BS5 could have been so much more regardless of the cost/form factor.

I think I might buy it, I am waiting for the demo unit to show up at my dealer.

Biggest problem for me is, that I do not have space. My BV8 sits next to my BC2 on a shelf and there is no more space to put it. Plus it would look too crowded. I don't like the floorstand option much.

Also, i am not sure I understand the rings yet. The middle one is obviously moving, the top one though, is that like the BC2?

if thats the case I would skip it, that BC2 wheel does work for adjusting volume but for navigation through hundreds of CDs I would not want that "touch and feel".

Gorissek, I certainly see what you mean about wanting peace of mind, particularly since B&O equipment is designed to last years and years - one would of course expect a growing CD collection over this time! However, the current hard drive would hold between 1,500 to 2,000 CDs in lossless format (I'm sure someone will correct me if this is wrong, but I am confident that I'm not)

 Even the largest CD collection would struggle to fill all that space, so I really think it is more than adequate even for future peace of mind. You are right though, the dealer will send all your CDs to be ripped upon first purchase, so all the initial hassle is removed. I believe your music will also be backed up as well, as part of the service, though I'm not certain. Terrabyte storage is really only useful when storing hundreds of movies.

Let's then assume that the customer is a big music fan and buys a new CD every 2 weeks - ripping takes a few minutes and the recording is then instantly clicked and dragged across like BeoPlayer or BeoMedia, and is not an arduous task to do very occasionally, whereas having an integrated CD drive goes completely against the idea of the BeoSound 5, and would only very rarely be used after the initial ripping has been done. It would be like B&O designing a CD player with a MiniDisc drive - occasionally useful but on the whole redundant!

 I think I'm repeating myself too, but I'm just a little surprised that lots of people seem to be missing the true purpose of such a new (and I think exciting) system. It would be strange if people complained that BeoCenter 2 didn't have the recording facility of BeoSound 3200 or BeoSound 4 - they would be missing the point of it. I think that's what many people (not just you Gorissek, this isn't a personal attack!) are doing here.