folkdeejay wrote:

Well said Mr Tounedos.

 

Voice of reason in a muddled, woolly headed thread.

Agree 100%

Jonathan wrote:

Dkatz wrote:

 I lived in London for 5 ½ years, which is probably far more multicultural than any city in Australia. I met and befriended people from almost every country in the world, and as mentioned I had flatmates from China, Japan, Cameroon, France, England, Italy, many countries in that time period. I learned about their cultures, customs, etc... Actually I found that the Chinese I knew were probably the ones most disappointed in Chinese quality.

 

 

Clearly you've never travelled out of the UK! London is not very multicultural at all!

You could not be more wrong.

According to the 2001 Census,27% of London's population was born outside of the UK,with more than 300 different languages spoken by it's permanent residents.

I have been in the retail consumer electronics industry for 20 years and believe that to have only one faulty product in the space of 14 months is very good going, obviously we never want to see one but that's life, things happen and it how we as dealers then deal with it; as for this subject I have to wave goodbye to it now and respect all of your opinions but my time is better spent selling BeoSound 8's and Beolit12's to people that actually want to buy them...

Thanks. I am going to say goodbye to this thread also.

Noooo! You guys, the can of gasoline is on me! 😂😂

 

Don't give up yet. This has been an insanely entertaining thread.

moxxey wrote:

Beolit 12 are NOT nasty cheaply made pieces of junk.

 

I walked into B&O's Wilmslow store on Monday.

First time i'd seen a Beolit 12 'in the flesh'

I picked it up off the shelf, had a look all round it, looked at the 'designed in Denmark, made in China' label on the bottom.

Asked the salesman if I could hear it. 'Unless you have an iphone or ipod on you, I'm afraid you cant just now' was the response. I dont have an iphone.

So I couldn't hear it. I'll just have to take people's word for it that it sounds amazing. It may well sound great. I hope it does. And I dont doubt it does in fact.

Going off looks and 'feel' though however, cheap and nasty came to mind. Not B&O impressive.

Salesman wasn't too B&O savvy either. Said he's only worked there for 6 months and therefore 'I probably knew more about B&O than he did'.

As he didnt seem to be even aware of what a Beosystem 7000/ Penta Speakers / BV5 was, I think he was probably right. 

Is the Beolit 12 about £500-600?  I wouldnt give you 50 quid for it.

I've been a B&O customer and fan since age 15 in 1987.

Shame - sounds like you had a bad expereience.- I heard it in King Street in Manchester city centre - with a wide choice of music via ipad and also Spotify on the shop PC.

It filled the shopfloor in a hugely impressive way -and its quite a big shop - and whilst it  it would not be my choice for a "critical listening" system, but the sound, design, size, build and features do just the right thing for a portable speaker.

I was actually more impressed than I expected to be.  Easily as well made than the old Beosystem 10 I owned (and still regret selling), and certainly sounded way better.

It is on my list for sure.

Bentleyman wrote:

Going off looks and 'feel' though however, cheap and nasty came to mind. Not B&O impressive.

 

As it happens, I don't care for the Beolit 12 either - however it's because I don't like the design nor the materials selected. There is nothing about the one that I saw that intimated poor quality assembly. I could therefore blame the designer - however others seem to like it a lot. It appears then that it is a product whose design divides opinion - funnily enough something that B&O designs have a history of doing!

As a comparison, I never liked the Century, I thought it looked completely underwhelming and not unlike something Sharp would offer at the time. They sold very well.

Puncher wrote:

As it happens, I don't care for the Beolit 12 either - however it's because I don't like the design nor the materials selected. There is nothing about the one that I saw that intimated poor quality assembly. I could therefore blame the designer - however others seem to like it a lot. 

I agree with that. I also said the same thing - I'm indifferent about the Beolit 12. It doesn't wow me nor put me off. It's definitely not cheap and nasty (I notice that all the supporters of Danish-only manufacturing, all agree that the new products are "cheap and nasty", funny that...) though. Sound is pretty reasonable for such a small product.

The finish is fine, but the design is so-so. I'm going to wait until I see the other colours in March.

Tournedos – My point is that the reason B&O don't outsource their higher end goods is because they consider them to be luxury high quality products. Otherwise they would outsource those and start mass manufacturing them as well! Most of the high end A/V companies are low production, but so is B&O in comparison to ones that do outsource. You even find some Panasonic, Sony, and other manufacturers that have high end units that they don't outsource that are not lower production than B&O!

 

A/V Manufacture differs from computer and other “electronic” manufacturers in that the quality really does get a lot better with hand assembly, testing, etc... as they do in Struer. If you think that nice ladies don't solder resistors and capacitors to boards anymore, think again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oXvXO4aYCM These Genesis amplifiers are handmade in England and you can see from the video how the ladies do exactly as you describe. These car amplifiers cost less than most B&O equipment and are built even more by hand, they are not so limited production that you can't find it in a decent car audio store, in fact most good ones in the US and around the world carry them. They still manage to turn a decent profit and even though they employ less people than B&O, the point is they keep their image alive. 

 

With B&O outsourcing they are ruining their image, you say they are not a high end audio manufacturer in your book, maybe that's exactly the problem. I understand why they outsourced, I just don't agree with it. My question was not towards this, it was about if China was so amazing at manufacturing, as good or better than the west, then why doesn't B&O outsource all their products and start producing more for less? I think you and many others know the answer to this but try to justify China's manufacture as being better somehow... It's not only about low volume manufacture not being moved abroad, there is high volume manufacture such as Fujitsu Siemens factory in Bavaria, Germany and some of Nokia's manufacture in Finland, etc... and they make a great profit whilst not outsourcing!

 

Puncher – My point was that the workers in Struer go through rigorous training schemes and aren't just hired straight to just manufacture any product. In China however, it is the complete opposite, you have a factory with workers that make products for hundreds of other companies that have differing standards. The quality control is extremely strict in Struer and each unit is rigorously tested, I doubt they would have the time to do that in China, especially with the mass manufacturing process. You don't have 100,000 people in a building manufacturing together either, you have a couple thousand at most, many of which are far from each other, some in separate rooms, etc... Much like in the Leica factory I visited in Germany. My point is that they look more like big workshops than like the factories of China. Therefore more time is spent on each product hence why the BS8 and Beolit 12 might be only marginally better if built in Struer, but with such mass manufacture I doubt the quality would be that much better.

 

It's common sense and obvious that Labour and Materials costs in China would be a lot less than in Denmark or almost anywhere in Europe! This is why they went to China in the first place. The Labour cost would be no different than with any other unit that costs $100 as it is still around $1.68 for manufacturing labour per hour in China. The plastics and metals would probably be coming out of the same factories as for the $100 models and might be made marginally better but for not much more cost. The components are where most of the real cost is, but considering how cheap the labour and materials are, the components alone would not justify the high price tag of the BS8 and Beolit 12, especially giving consideration that they were also built in China with Chinese labour and material costs!

 

My biggest concern however is that companies are not being transparent about their manufacture in China. They don't show videos or photo's of the factories too often as they do for their western factories. They won't let any consumer just go and visit the factory and talk to the workers there. They will never show how much it costs them to manufacture those products because consumers would definitely be taken aback and like I said, the price doesn't transfer to the consumer. When Dyson and other companies outsourced, they kept the same price or even made it higher after a few years, rather than reducing it! If it costs them a lot less to manufacture then it should cost the consumer less.

 

I appreciate your opinion and thank you for your input. I however, also have many friends in the manufacturing industry, many of which are engineers and have had 20-40 years of experience themselves. Their opinion is completely different from yours and many people on this board. As I mentioned, I interviewed dozens of engineers, product managers, directors of factories, etc... and the reasons they gave me (as mentioned in my previous post) were the same reasons I have been giving. Is it possible that they are all wrong and everyone else on this forum who keeps arguing with me is right? I highly doubt it, especially given the experience, expertise, and decisions they have to make. Some of them manufacture more than B&O does and some less, but they all keep manufacturing under one roof and manage to thrive and pay their workers well.

 

I will have to agree with you on the Century, it did look and feel cheap and had constant problems with the CD deck (from what I've heard it was some cheap Philips unit that they used?) I was always thinking about getting one because I couldn't afford an Ouverture. I think, however the Beolit 12 is not as well built as the Beosystem 10.  I think it's more than just design of plastics, again the BS8 and Beolit 12 were made in China from Chinese molded plastics perhaps not to B&Os own standards of their higher quality goods. Perhaps molding their own plastics for the unit would have been to cost prohibitive... Like I said, I think it's more than just giving specifications of quality of plastics, if it were the case then the BS8 and Beolit 12 would have the quality of BL5 plastic in it!