beojeff wrote:

I see a great deal of merit of the point the original poster is making. I think of the music system as the heart of the audio in the home -- such as the BeoSound 5 or the Moment. I just can't think of the Essence in the same way. I think of the Essence more as a replacement of a BeoLink Active box for connecting a set of BeoLabs to the system.

I can see how the lines are getting blurred these days with a younger generation using their phones as the source of their music. I for one still prefer the ritual of approaching the music system and selecting the music without using an iOS device.

I have to admit that the current BeoSound range is very limited and not actually my definition of a sound system, because there is no internal source! A BeoSound or BeoPlay A something is just an interface, there is no built-in radio, no built-in drive, unless you plug a storage device or connect it to your home network, it won't play anything..I think that's what the first post meant.

In this respect, I wonder why B&O labels the A8 or A9 as "audio" products, they could have called them S8 or S9, because they are just active speakers with basic control functions.

Christophe wrote:

I have to admit that the current BeoSound range is very limited and not actually my definition of a sound system, because there is no internal source! A BeoSound or BeoPlay A something is just an interface, there is no built-in radio, no built-in drive, unless you plug a storage device or connect it to your home network, it won't play anything..I think that's what the first post meant.

In this respect, I wonder why B&O labels the A8 or A9 as "audio" products, they could have called them S8 or S9, because they are just active speakers with basic control functions.

Razlaw wrote:

I had a dealer make exactly the same comment to me that you make, think of the Essence as a replacement for BeoLink Active.

Maybe he should reconsider, if selling B&O products is the right thing for him.

MM

That isn't correct :-) all the "new" products (A9 MKII and assence MKII is in that group) has built in sources.

You can setup eg. TuneIn (radio) and deezer on them, and play without an app.

I'm using essence MKII at home, and I'm very happy about the TuneIn part especially, because it's so easy to turn on and listen to radio :-)

Raeuber wrote:

I think the question is: Can a streaming solution be a music system? I have to say this is hard to accept for me (because I'm an old guy who still knows what 'HiFi' means), but nowadays it is.

That is exactly the point.

B&O as a company is not making stuff for past generations - they have to look at now and, what is in the future.

To guys like you seeing a disc spinning in a 6 CD changer probably is happiness.

But that is not, what is going to sell today (and tomorrow).

To me the important thing is: how can I achieve, what I want in the best way.

Sure I have and use a 'real' cd player and even a 'real' vinyl player.

But much more important to me is - how can I stream (yes you know, what that is) the music (= albums), that I want to listen to and how can I access the radio stations, I like to listen to/need for information.

Honestly - all I need is some excellent speakers (in different sizes for different listening purposes) with either built-in (!) streaming and radio possibilities or as a combo of speakers and a minimal control unit/tablet unit.

That is, what B&O tries to offer - and if I should start from scratch today this would be, what I'd buy.

MM

kaliffen wrote:

That isn't correct :-) all the "new" products (A9 MKII and assence MKII is in that group) has built in sources.

You can setup eg. TuneIn (radio) and deezer on them, and play without an app.

I'm using essence MKII at home, and I'm very happy about the TuneIn part especially, because it's so easy to turn on and listen to radio :-)

Well said  - and with far fewer words, than I tend to use ;-))

MM

vikinger wrote:

HiFi? How very old school. You must be closer than we thought  to the pipe and slippers image you like to mention.

Graham

2011 marks an end of an era to me, in which we see the disappearance from sound systems in a way I use to know them for many years from B&O. And I'm referring here mostly to the lost of terrestrial radio in sound systems. Newer sound products became expressed in a simple way as a computer terminal or Internet platform.

It was thrilling to me, finally getting the opportunity to listen to the world, in a way I could never dreamed of when I was a young kid. Free of any noise, interference… crystal clear, exactly like the announcer was next to my house.

2015, the year I fully embraced the digital world by removing my old BS3200 to the basement and opting for the last digital link in my home. The BS Moment, it is my brain on the Internet, the device brings high mass of musical experience with "the love ... ..”. Its my musical climax. It is also the year I completely switched to be dependent on a coax cable entering my house for all my needs of entertainment as: television, radio, phone, reading papers, being in contact with the outside world. Feels a bit frightening, solely being dependable on coax cable, a fiber or copper pair for all your needs, even my heating system is connected to that little plastic looking cable to get information for an ‘ideal’ heating curve in my house. This process also has its mirror. We are also listening to strangers all the time. Nothing that takes place anywhere in the world and is communicated on the Internet is at a remove any longer. Just as everyone on the Internet is a potential recipient and transmitter of our signals, we too are stations for the reception and relay of other people's messages. This constancy of connection to the nervous systems of billions of others comes with its own consequences.

No one can be immune to the storms that shake the world today. What happens down our streets becomes as present in our lives as what happens down our modems. This makes us present in vital and existential ways to what might be happening at great distance, but it also brings with it the possibility of a disconnect with what is happening around us, or near us, if they happen not to be online.

I grew up with my mother who came from Poland, married to my Belgian father after WW2 and was frightened by the postwar era in her birth country. A government that spied on its citizens; this is what she had fled. In Eastern Europe, my mother explained, you assumed that other people read your mail. This never led to good. When someone knows everything, everyone can be turned into an informer. She was proud to be in the West where things were different. Every morning, we went together to the mailbox of our house. And many days, she would tell me as if it had never come up before, "In Western Europe, no one can look at your mail. It's a federal offense. That's the beauty of this countrys.” For me, and from the earliest age, this civics lessons at the mailbox joined together privacy and civil liberties. I think of how different things are for today's teenagers who accommodate to the idea that their e-mail might be scanned by school authorities and that their online identities might be tampered with. Not a few sum up their position on all of this by saying in one way or another: "The way to deal is to just be good."

But sometimes a citizenry should not "be good." You have to leave room for this, space for dissent, real dissent. You need to leave technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and mental space. The two are intertwined. We make our technologies and they, in turn, make and shape us. My mother made me an Belgian citizen and a civil libertarian in front of a row of mailboxes in my home town. I am not sure what to tell and 18-year-old who thinks that Loopt (the application that uses the GPS capability of the iPhone to show you where your friends are) seems creepy but notes that it would be hard to keep it off her phone if all her friends had it. "They would think I had something to hide."

In democracy, perhaps we all need to begin with the assumption that everyone has something to hide, a zone of private action and reflection, a zone that needs to be protected. Life with an electronic shadow provokes anxieties that lead today's teenagers to look toward a past they never knew. This nostalgia of the young looks forward because it may remind us of things that are worth protecting. So, for example, teens talk longingly about the "full attention" that is implicit when someone sends you a letter or meets with you in a face-to-face meeting. And poignantly, they talk about seeking out a pay phone when they really want to have a private conversation.

The Internet teaches us to rethink nostalgia and give it a good name. I learned to be a citizen at the mailbox. To me, opening up a conversation about rethinking the Net, privacy, and civil society is not backward-looking nostalgia or Luddite in the least. It seems like part of a healthy process of democracy defining its sacred spaces.

The Internet hasn't, so far, changed how I think. The Internet is brain candy to me and, I suspect, to most of us, it slakes our appetite to keep our brain occupied. That moment when Deezer’s search engine pops up its search results to my query is a moment of pure injection of glucose into my brain. I love it.

Some think that this is why the Internet is going to make us lazy, less-literate, and less-numerate, that we will forget what lovely things books an CD’s are, and so on. But even as brain candy I think the Internet's influence on these sorts of capabilities and pleasures is probably not as serious as the curmudgeons and troglodytes would have you believe. They will be the same people who grumbled about the telegraph, trains, the motorcar, the wireless, and television.

Millemissen wrote:

That is exactly the point.

B&O as a company is not making stuff for past generations - they have to look at now and, what is in the future.

To guys like you seeing a disc spinning in a 6 CD changer probably is happiness.

But that is not, what is going to sell today (and tomorrow).

To me the important thing is: how can I achieve, what I want in the best way.

Sure I have and use a 'real' cd player and even a 'real' vinyl player.

But much more important to me is - how can I stream (yes you know, what that is) the music (= albums), that I want to listen to and how can I access the radio stations, I like to listen to/need for information.

Honestly - all I need is some excellent speakers (in different sizes for different listening purposes) with either built-in (!) streaming and radio possibilities or as a combo of speakers and a minimal control unit/tablet unit.

That is, what B&O tries to offer - and if I should start from scratch today this would be, what I'd buy.

MM

There is a tv - and there is a BV.

Chris wrote:

But sometimes a citizenry should not "be good." You have to leave room for this, space for dissent, real dissent. You need to leave technical space (a sacrosanct mailbox) and mental space. The two are intertwined.

Thanks to these words and to the marvellous rest of your statement. We should learn the children's bitter lessons on the game "Pflicht oder Wahrheit" / "Truth or Dare" which always ended in tears as far as I witnessed.

I hope that I don't pay a too high price either for the plethora of chances the means of communication of this decade offer.