Beosound Balance - Issue with stereo pairing

37 replies

I might be one of the only others here with a Balance Stereo pair, and I've had very similar issues. I was actually going to send one of my speakers off to B&O for repair, but now maybe I'll hold off. 

The right side speaker constantly malfunctions. I've had to factory reset it over and over again because it loses signal and no longer appears in the app at all. What I haven't done yet is try switching the left for the right. I'll do that today. 

Question, just to see if you're having the same problem I am - when you look at the speaker settings, does your stereo pair show Left and Unknown? That's what I see most of the time lately. 

65535 wrote:

Are they linked as a stereo pair in your Google Home app?

Not what you wanted to hear but if you bought your Balances to use as a pair, and there's time to return them, that's what I'd do.

Never checked the Google Home app since today the B&O app is able to setup a stereo pair internally, without redirecting to the Google Home app. But I am going to check how it looks within Google Home once set up in the B&O app.

I had actually not had any plans of buying two Balances at first. I wanted to get one and add it in a Beolink multiroom setup. The reason I ended up buying two was because I was waiting for my Balance Bespoke to be made for me while the Nordic Ice edition came out. I didn’t want to miss out on the Nordic Ice even if I was just about to get delivery of my Bespoke edition. So stereo was not really a part of the plan but I am trying to get it to work.

matteventu wrote:

Can you try to entirely disable the 2.4GHz SSID (ensuring the BS Balance are connected to the 5GHz band) in your routers/APs control panel, and see after that if the sound from the R speaker is still cutting out?

The Balance can't be stereo-paired running an Ethernet cable between the speakers (like Beolab 28), correct?

Hope you’ll get this because I got my first answer stopped for moderation.

There are two Ethernet ports on the Balance, so in theory I could try but I have simply wired each speaker separately to my router. I might try it later and see how the B&O app then behaves.

I will need some alone-time at home with testing disabling 2.4GHz on a weekend, so this may take a while. I have a customer-facing job and depend heavily on a working network that I wouldn’t like to mess with :). But good tip! I’ll get back to this.

Csaba wrote:

matteventu wrote:

Can you try to entirely disable the 2.4GHz SSID (ensuring the BS Balance are connected to the 5GHz band) in your routers/APs control panel, and see after that if the sound from the R speaker is still cutting out?

The Balance can't be stereo-paired running an Ethernet cable between the speakers (like Beolab 28), correct?

Hope you’ll get this because I got my first answer stopped for moderation.

There are two Ethernet ports on the Balance, so in theory I could try but I have simply wired each speaker separately to my router. I might try it later and see how the B&O app then behaves.

I will need some alone-time at home with testing disabling 2.4GHz on a weekend, so this may take a while. I have a customer-facing job and depend heavily on a working network that I wouldn’t like to mess with :). But good tip! I’ll get back to this.

 

I would advise against disabling 2.4 GHz. Instead I would recommend to try to connect your Balance speakers to 2.4 GHz and then do the stereo pairing. This will provide more headroom and less interference on the 5 Ghz band to be used for the Wi-Fi link between the speakers.

 

c-larsen wrote:

Csaba wrote:

matteventu wrote:

Can you try to entirely disable the 2.4GHz SSID (ensuring the BS Balance are connected to the 5GHz band) in your routers/APs control panel, and see after that if the sound from the R speaker is still cutting out?

The Balance can't be stereo-paired running an Ethernet cable between the speakers (like Beolab 28), correct?

Hope you’ll get this because I got my first answer stopped for moderation.

There are two Ethernet ports on the Balance, so in theory I could try but I have simply wired each speaker separately to my router. I might try it later and see how the B&O app then behaves.

I will need some alone-time at home with testing disabling 2.4GHz on a weekend, so this may take a while. I have a customer-facing job and depend heavily on a working network that I wouldn’t like to mess with :). But good tip! I’ll get back to this.

 

I would advise against disabling 2.4 GHz. Instead I would recommend to try to connect your Balance speakers to 2.4 GHz and then do the stereo pairing. This will provide more headroom and less interference on the 5 Ghz band to be used for the Wi-Fi link between the speakers.

 

 

 

There should be more people like you in the forum :)

So you're confirming the Mozart products use a wireless connection on the 5GHz band encoded with LC3plus to communicate each other when stereo paired natively via B&O app?

If so, that's good to know, I was afraid they did that over Bluetooth (hence the thought the Wi-Fi 2.4GHz signal could interfere with the wireless link between the 2 speakers).

Is it an 802.11 connection, or any other kind of standard? You mentioned there's an option to select "LC3plus". Can you please elaborate on this? Not having 2 Mozart B&O speakers at hand at the moment I can't check myself 🙂

Is there an option that lets you configure the codec used? What are the alternatives to the LC3plus option, in the app?

Thanks a lot for your contribution!

It is basically a good idea if you have both 2,4G and 5G on your wifi router, devide the SSID names in 2.

For example one with the SSID Csaba's network_2,4G and the other with Csaba's network_5G.

Then is it easy to see what band a device is connected to.

I personally always have a few lan-cables lying around for testing stuff, just for ruling things out.

good luck,

Location: Netherlands

A.K.A Capt’nGerard on the Discord

 

c-larsen wrote:

Okay, I only had the option to send an e-mail, maybe that function does not work.

 

It sounds like your problem is caused by WiFi interference on the wireless link between the two speakers. Could you answer a couple of questions:

1. Are your speakers connected to a 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz network?

2. Have you changed the default sound quality settings from the app? (default is to use LC3+)

 

I very much appreciate your kind help! :)

Not too easy questions to answer.

I will take a closer look as soon as I get a chance, right now as I am writing I can only say that any device I connect to my wifi seems to be connected to 5GHz. I just don’t know how this is controlled by my wifi settings. I will probably need to test stereo setup with only 2.4 enabled and only 5 GHz. I have read that in my AirTies 4930 there is an additional chip for extra processing power. On the other hand the 5GHz light indicator on every AP has always been blinking every few seconds while the one for 2.4 has always been lit up continuously. I have not checked if my right-channel Balance would cut off exactly when the light on the 5GHz blinks once, but so far I have a feeling they might be connected to 5GHz and that I might have an issue with this very frequency. I must add I am not a network expert but I will need to doublecheck my theory on a weekend. I have 3 APs and I have tested stereo previously on both the strongest and weakest AP-signal.

Regarding the sound, I am not sure what you mean by LC3+. Sorry if this is very basic :). All I think I have configured for standalone or Beolink is Omni-channel with 2 units of treble added and that the speaker is stood by the wall. After each repositioning I’d run Active Room Compensation. Otherwise AirPlay multiroom and Beolink are enabled as this is what I use the most. With stereo I have noticed that Omni-direction would always change to Forward automatically.

Last but not least something that I have been wondering about is if anybody has ever attempted to stereo-pair a non-GA and a GA-enabled Balance and what would happen. Customer care having checked mine based on serial number they could confirm that both of mine were non-GA. Hopefully this can be trusted, just like the order I placed for my non-GA Bespoke edition at my dealer’s. Strangely the B&O app shows my Bespoke edition as Beosound Balance Google Assistant under the attribute Product type whereas my Nordic Ice is just Beosound Balance. I cannot be 100% sure because of the clues one should look for, but everything except this product type info indicates that my Bespoke one is also non-GA. There is also something called a Type number, which is the same for both speakers. I do not know if this differs depending on if the Balance contains GA. But I do think this can be ruled out.

 

Gaea wrote:

It is basically a good idea if you have both 2,4G and 5G on your wifi router, devide the SSID names in 2.

For example one with the SSID Csaba's network_2,4G and the other with Csaba's network_5G.

Then is it easy to see what band a device is connected to.

I personally always have a few lan-cables lying around for testing stuff, just for ruling things out.

good luck,

Yeah, that’s how mine came out of the box. Names tagged with frequency. However after I set up a mesh 3-point network for better performance and coverage even the 5GHz frequency had inherited the name of the 2.4GHz network. I’ll need to dig a bit deeper into this.

Thanks all for all the fantastic input so far!! This is the dialog I was not able to have with customer care.

I agree actually that I probably shouldn’t disable 2.4 as such, but I need to find a way to have my Balances connect to that one. Maybe I’m slightly confused because both networks have automatically been named the same when I set up mesh.

Next I will need to verify if they really connect to 5GHz (I think so), then if the drop-outs occur at the same time as the light indicator blinking once on the 5GHz network, and then rename the two networks and see if I could simply connect the speakers from the B&O app to the correct one. Should be relatively straightforward.

Glad to help. I think you will benefit a lot from separating the two bands by fx creating <ssid_2_4> and <ssid_5> so you know which devices is running on which band. Once that is done I would recommend to try to connect your Balances to the 2.4 Ghz network and then just stereo pair them via the app as usual.

I look forward to hear if your issues go away. Otherwise let me know :)

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