Hi you all knowledgeable people :)
Why are you not surprised about seeing my enquiry here, asking for support from you instead of B&O customer service?
As I am sure you can tell I HAVE been in touch with them, but after a lengthy dialog and many emails and troubleshooting I find myself in the position where they do not seem to be able to find out what is wrong. To be fair, it is not something that can be easily troubleshot (troubleshooted?) remotely. Not even locally.
Furthermore I am interested in if anyone else:
- owns two Balances
- has tried stereo-pairing them
- has had the same issue as me.
What's my problem then?
Well, both of my non-GA Balances work perfectly, no flaws, they play beautifully both on their own as standalone speakers and in Beolink multiroom set up via the B&O app, using the same home wireless network that has very seldom shown signs of weakness, particularly since I have a good dose of access points in a mesh setup.
Then we come to stereo pairing. It is a fairly straightforward process in the B&O app. Choose a master = left-channel speaker, then link it to the right-channel speaker.
The moment I start actually using this stereo setup, the right-channel speaker starts dropping out. My experience of stereo music then becomes one where the left-channel speaker plays smoothly while the right-channel speaker keeps dropping out. As though muting and unmuting the right-hand speaker rapidly, with varying intensity or length, kind of like when signal keeps dropping out.
Swap around the speakers both physically and in the B&O app, and again it is the right-channel speaker dropping out. Then the speaker that used to be right-channel and that used to drop out, is now playing without a hick-up as the left-channel speaker.
As mentioned above, using the same home wireless network and the B&O app, the speakers each play back flawlessly in a Beolink multiroom setup. It is really only in stereo mode.
What else have I done?
Factory reset? Course, on both! Same issue after that too.
Ethernet cable? Ordered, set up, tested, actually working well, so stereo is working as expected wired.
Closer distance? Wirelessly but instead of the speakers standing about 2-3 meters from each other, the right-channel speaker would still keep dropping out even at a distance of about 30-40 cm (like a foot?) from the other.
Some more thoughts
Somehow I would think this is more of a software issue than a network issue, even if the latter cannot be ruled out strictly speaking. But if it is a network issue, why would Beolink multiroom work without a problem? At some point stereo mode even got disconnected on its own after a lot of drop-outs... or should I call them "signal interruptions" at this point?
B&O customer service in the end advised me to contact a local dealer to see if they could send a... wait for it... paid onsite technician to have it check. In my mind this is not too generous since these are brand new speakers and I would expect that something works as intended out of the box, or if it doesn't, then they should make sure it does for no extra cost to me. It also requires a lot of logistics and time and hassle that I could do without. There is no guarantee if a technician I would pay extra for, would actually find the cause of the problem.
Let me add that the whole case is more of an inconvenience for me than a deal-breaker because a workaround is of course to use Ethernet cables, and because stereo is simply another listening option for me but not my main means of consumption. What matters the most to me is really Beolink and thankfully that works like magic. I can even live with the issue of wirelessly paired stereo mode and hope that one day a B&O developer discovers that this is not only an issue but that could somehow be improved from the software side. But I'd be curious to know if anyone else may have had a similar experience. If not with the Balance, perhaps with the Level?
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Csaba
