Hi Beoworlders,

I hope that this information may be useful to some of you, as I have been doing some tests on Beolab 28 speakers to see how they can best be used with a non-B&O TV or AV system.  If anyone spots any errors here, please reply to correct me!

For use with a B&O TV or Beosystem, a shielded RJ45 Powerlink cable can be used to each speaker (please see my sponsor link at the foot of this page for more details of these cables).

There are also a number of  solutions to use these speakers with a non-B&O TV or AV receiver:-

The first (wireless) option is to buy an Apple TV 4k 2nd gen (earlier versions won't work, it must be this version or newer) and plug this into the HDMI ARC socket on the TV.  Now, any audio playing on the TV (eg. BluRay, internal TV tuner, etc) can be sent to the Apple TV.  By assigning a room in the Apple Home app and placing the Apple TV and the B&O speakers in the same room within the app, you can stream the TV sound from the Apple TV to the speakers wirelessly via Airplay without any noticeable audio delay.

For best resilience, a wired connection to the speakers is recommended.  This can be achieved via either B&O's Connection Hub (also called the S8 Hub) or the Core.  An optical cable goes from the TV to either of these products and then RJ45 Powerlink cables are used to the speakers.  Please note that the B&O Connection Hub "learns" the TV remote control commands, this product only works with IR remotes, not Bluetooth.  Volume control from the B&O Core would be via the B&O app, or from a B&O remote.

If you want to use Beolab 28 as part of a non-B&O surround sound system, then I suggest looking for an AV receiver with RCA pre-out sockets fitted for all audio channels.  I can then provide a trigger cable to activate the speakers via their Powerlink inputs directly from the AVR.  Please feel free to get in touch via my sponsor link below for help and advice with cables for Beolab 28.

An alternative version of this trigger cable can also be used directly with the headphone socket of a non-B&O TV for setups where a simple wired connection is preferred, in this case the TV remote control will be used to adjust the speaker volume.  In this case, there is no limitation on the type of remote used by the TV, this works for both Bluetooth and IR remotes.

Please note that I have not tried any third party products (eg. Almando) so I can't comment on these.

It is worth noting that a physical Ethernet cable to each speaker gives a much more reliable internet connection from your router than wi-fi, particularly when using two speakers paired together. 

For reference, the 3.5mm minijack line input of these speakers has a significant delay (around 330 milliseconds) which puts the sound out of sync with the TV picture.  Hence, this input cannot be used with any video source, eg. TV or AVR.

Please ask if you need help with cables for any of these speakers via my sponsor link below.

If I have made any errors or omissions, please reply to let me know!

Kind regards, Steve.