link

From your answer Mr10Percent, I understand that using optical (digital output) to the BL5’s, I will get better quality than using good quality PowerLink cables?

My experience of pumping Beosound 5 output to the BL5's is that Coax to BL5 will give a superior sound over Powerlink alone. I would state with this setup ,the music output stayed in the digital domain right up to the BL5 DAC stage. Looking at your setup, I would look at the capabilities of iphone and airplay in terms of digital output. A lot of phones downgrade their outputs depending on the codec being used. If you were pumping sound from a purpose-built music server via the LAN, Im sure this would be as good as you can get from this equipment. However, I am uncertain what the Core does in terms of the Line-in (analogue & digital combo)" and airplay or what Airplay and your phone is doing?  From your last post, it sounds like the BL5s are playing unfiltered noise with the music signal  from the 96 to 192kHz band. By selecting 48kHz, you are filtering the signal above 96kHz (aka 0.5 Nyquist). Now, thinking on my feet,  if you have a home network and a PC (better still, a NAS), I think you can make the PC (network search on) into a Music server and in the Beoapp select it as DNLA. It will then collect all the relevant music files (Core does not support WMA if you are still there??). This should allow you to play files up to 96kHz to the Core and you can decide if the Core DAC is OK with Powerlink alone or if you should keep it in the digital domain a little longer to export it via Toslink/coax direct to the BL5. This should give you a good indication if it is the Phone codecs, the core DAC or the BL5 internal fault. Im sure there are plenty of people on this site who can review what i have said and see if the logic is good? Rgds    

I had the same problem with my BL5 some years ago. First I thought that the problem was the 96kHz spdif signal, as the BL5 has a 88.2kHz limit written in the manual.

One speaker was fine but the other sounded weird in the tweeter. I found out that when daising chaining the spdif signal, the output from one speaker to the second one is limited to 44.1kHz, even when the original signal in the first speaker is higher.

However, looks like someone updated the eletronics to allow 96kHz input, but forgot to mention that in the manual.

 

In the end, i found out that the distortion was from bad cable. I was using ordinary analog audio cable, which has good shielding up to 50 kHz signal. As I was feeding 96 kHz signal, lots of distortion came up. The second speaker didn't show any distortion because the signal was reduced to 48kHz.

So I changed my spdif cable to a digital one and then everything was great.

 

Steve from Sounds Heavenly can help you with that.

My BL5s are only connected to my Harmony using Powerlink - the Harmony doesn't have a digital out does it?

I mainly listen to music though my Moment, but as far as I know that doesn't have a digital out.  I do have a BS9000 which I know does, but I rarely listen to it these days...

Would I get a materially better sound quality using a Core and a digital connection rather than a Moment using Powerlink?

Thanks, Jason

Delete