I would agree. I currently own BL20s, 17s, 3s, A9 4th Gen, a pair of Balances, BS2 and BS Level.

17s are incredibly clear and powerful for their size. I actually prefer them over the Balance pair. I find the Balance more powerful and loud, but clinical. The 17s, 20s and 3s can convince me, when I close my eyes, that the artist/music is right in front of me. The Balance always reminds me it's a speaker. Now if I was new to B&O and had only heard the Balance stereo pair, I would be very impressed. They are still great speakers. Just lacking that amazing tone of previous BL speakers. I've heard the same about the 28s vs the 20s. That's why I haven't traded my 20s for 28s.

I agree about the BS2 and Balance single. Balance has more power, but the BS2 is crystal clear and so pleasing to my ears. And wide soundstage.

To me, the A9 also has the same tone as the previous BLs. So lifelike!

Not quite the comparison asked for here, but if I stream  radio to my BV11 active speakers, the sound seems slightly sharper than streaming via either a Beomaster 2000 or Olive 1 to Beovox S45's. Of course this may reflect nothing more than the low frequency capability of the S45's.

Graham

Here are two Areas that “might”require consideration in this discussion:

1.       Exactness of the produced sound (deviation in the sound compared to the sound that was produced by the artist)

2.       Individual preferences

There is no need to discuss difference in preferences as it is individual. When it comes to exactness I believe the issue of sound separation becomes an issue, especially with music with many layers of tones (such as orchestral). It then becomes obvious that woofer’s quickness and their numbers play a central role. The more woofers you have (assuming that they are nicely separated using high quality cross-overs), the better different tones can be separated. That is probably why many people love their Pentas. It is also a fact that newer B&O speakers tend to have more woofers. So maybe the newer Beolabs can reproduce the sounds better.

There is another topic that could be of interest with regards to sound quality of a speaker. As a classic guitar player, I prefer using guitars with cedar tops for Spanish or “romantic” songs while I generally use Spruce top guitars for pieces by Bach or Mozart, etc. The reason for that is that Cedar is a softer material which means that the tones form the six different strings of the guitar are combined in a softer way (less separation), which somehow is preferred in the case of romantic songs while spruce, with better ability t separate tones provide more exact tones, which is preferred for many western classical songs.

The relevance of this to older or newer speakers “could be” that older woofers, because of their age, loose some of their agility, dynamics or ability to quickly jump form a frequency to another. For that reason the older speakers “may have” a softer/more blurred tone that could be perceived as warmer.

But, of course, this is just a hypothesis!

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I really would like to know if Geoff Marin uses an old Beovox speaker secretly at home Login to view image

I don't. Now you know. :-) -geoff marin

I have always struggled with descriptions of audio systems that "sound like the band is there".  I see quite a bit of live music of many genres, and rarely does it sound nearly as good as my home system.  The mix isn't perfect, it's too loud, the venue has weird acoustics, the audience is noisy, etc.

I would think the perfect case is a symphony playing in a well-designed symphony hall, but even supposedly perfect auditoriums will have sound differences between sitting in front (where individual instruments near the listener might overpower the rest of the symphony) vs more toward the back where the entire symphony's sounds are better balanced.

As someone said above, it's all personal preference.  The music doesn't "sound like the band is there", but rather like your idealized perception of how the band might sound if there.

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I really would like to know if Geoff Marin uses an old Beovox speaker secretly at home Login to view image

I don’t. Now you know. Login to view image -geoff marin

Although, if he actually told us the truth, it would no longer be a secret :D

I love my Pentas for their presentation and spatial elegance.
Coupled with a pair of Beovox 3000 (flat panel) in a 4 speaker pattern, a cd of Hail To The Thief, The Gloaming (track 8), is nothing short of magical.

I replaced a pair of Celestion Ditton 44's with BL Penta - but those Dittons are still in my posession because those too are glorious.

BL 6000 are the biggest disappointment for me. So shallow.

The best, in my opinion, are Beovox 1702. So beautiful and clear. Obviously they're small and won't rumble thunder on a film score, but play Nina Simone and your heart will melt.

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I have always struggled with descriptions of audio systems that “sound like the band is there”. I see quite a bit of live music of many genres, and rarely does it sound nearly as good as my home system. The mix isn’t perfect, it’s too loud, the venue has weird acoustics, the audience is noisy, etc. .

As the English comedian Jack Dee once said - I listen to the Pogues; I don't WANT them in my lounge..."

I totally agree with Stan. I find the opinion that a music reproduction system should sound like the musicians are in your listening room a little weird, since almost no recordings are made with that intention. We don't watch Star Wars and expect to think that Luke and Leia are in your living room... Movies aren't made to be like real life - they're made to be better than (or at least enhanced versions of ) real life. It's the same for music recordings: a typical classical music recording has the brightness and presence of being close to the instrument(s) AS WELL AS the reverberation and envelopment of sitting far back in the concert hall. In a typical pop recording (these days) the singers are in-tune, and make no mistakes - two attributes that are only possible with computer enhancement. The goal is to make the recording sound like the recording, since the recording doesn't reflect reality - it IS the reality that your playback system should reproduce. Glen Gould spoke and wrote about this decades ago - explaining that the reason he recorded instead of playing live concerts was because (in his opinion) the perfection that can be achieved through mic placement, mixing, and editing can never be experienced in real life. So, in my opinion, Jack Dee can be generalised beyond the Pogues to include all musicians. :-) (Thanks for the quote AdamS!) Of course, if we then take this argument to its logical conclusion, then you might arrive at the opinion that you can't use modern loudspeakers to reproduce old recordings... I would generalise this though. There are many cases where playing a recording through a "high quality" loudspeaker + system actually makes the end experience worse. Two obvious examples of this are:

• I don't need a system that has a frequency range that extends all the way into the stratosphere when I'm playing a 78 RPM shellac disc of Caruso. Better to roll off the top end with extreme prejudice to reduce the noise, since there's no signal up there worth speaking of.
• Eric Clapton's "Unplugged" album, played through a system with a very low low-end cutoff frequency will give you the ability to hear the sound of a foot tapping, coupled through a stage floor, mechanically shaking a vocal mic and resulting in a rhythmic rumble that probably wasn't supposed to be there... Rolling off the bottom end cleans this up considerably.

Then again, if you want to hear the shellac crackle and the stage rumble - it's not my place to tell you it's bad. As the thread starts, this is preference we're talking about... Cheers -geoff