BS5 Encore is at home

22 replies
MB
Offline
Mbee
Bronze
Posted March 13, 2012 at 09:46 GMT
#1965500

I have now received and installed my brand new BS5 Encore. A really nice device!

Here are my first thoughts :

- The table stand is made in an extraterrestrial material : I have never seen something so small wheighting so much! ❓

- As there is only one powerlink out, remember to be sure you have a long enough Powerlink Y splitter (or that your Beolabs are daisy-chained). My Y cable is a bit too short...

- The "fuzzy effect" while turning the wheel is not as annoying as I thought initially, you get a smooth response to the wheel turning at low speed

- My current NAS is a LaCie 2Big Network 2, and everything works flawlessly (I had previously made a very clean library with flac files, and a folder.jpg image in each album directory.

- My folder.jpg images are in 600px resolution. As the Encore displays them in 500px, there is an ugly downsacling with a lot of aliasing. Use 500px covers for best result.

- Sound quality is very good (that's a basic at this price and for this brand!!)

- No gapless playback is a nightmare on classical and mixed albums. PLEASE B&O, hurry up!!!

- Why is there no "Genre" choice in the library? That would help me!

- The Encore has run the MOTS calculations all night long, and it has only done something like 25% of the library (if the full analysis is at the end of the wheel). My library is approx. 6000 FLAC and 500 lossy files.

- The radio list is marketed as "high quality", but it's usually highly compressed streams (that's also the radio's fault...)

- The radio display is a bit poor : no logo, no schedule displayed on that big screen. (I like how TuneIn displays infos in a clean way on the iPad/iPhone)

- It communicates via the wired connection at a rate of 100Mbit/s, not 1000Mbit/s. So don't worry about network speed.

- I hope that a new software for 2-ways Beo6 and an iPad app will be released soon, to widen the use of the Encore.

- I hope that a Qobuz/Spotify/Deezer streaming functionality is planned. Every network players start to be compatible, a high end player should be!

- Labels says "country of origin : Denmark". Doesn't seem to be outsourced in China, that's sad, because that could have started a very popular thread on the new Beoworld 😐

I will add new things here when I discover them!

Initial conclusion : nice device, but some flows (gapless, image resizing, 2ways) should need to be corrected soon, for a high end device it's a bit lacking in functionality.

K(
Offline
kokomo (archived2)
Bronze
Posted March 13, 2012 at 10:46 GMT
#1965501

mbee wrote:
Initial conclusion : nice device, but some flows (gapless, image resizing, 2ways) should need to be corrected soon, for a high end device it's a bit lacking in functionality.

 

Thanks for that, very interesting. For such a high cost device (subjective I know), that the product is flawed and lacking in functionality is disappointing to say the least. 

MB
Offline
Mbee
Bronze
Posted March 13, 2012 at 11:08 GMT
#1965502

In terms of functionality, you currently get less than a Sonos (Sonos can play ALAC, gapless, Spotify+Deezer, play in sync in multiroom, can be used as a alarm clock with different hours for each day), but you also get some things that Sonos can't offer : MOTS, and a nice display with a cool way to browse your library (the Sonos interface on the iPad touchscreen is not so nice to play with)... It seems to be nothing, but it adds a lot when you have a big library.

MB
Offline
Mbee
Bronze
Posted March 13, 2012 at 22:06 GMT
#1965503

I've found that the Encore doesn't understand the disc number information... So if you have multiple disc albums and don't want to have as many covers as discs in the same album, you have to number the disc 2 and next ones with the chronology of the previous disc.

Not a big issue, but something I shouldn't have to care about...

N(
Offline
Newcastle (archived2)
Bronze
Posted March 13, 2012 at 22:25 GMT
#1965504

I think that as long as the tag info says disc one and disc two in the title, the Encore is fine recognising the different discs.  Its just that some of the databases don't label the discs as one and two no?

 

Also, wasn't ALAC added to the BS5 functionality about a couple of months ago?

 

Nice review!  I too am longing for streaming and two way to come to this product asap!

MB
Offline
Mbee
Bronze
Posted March 13, 2012 at 22:37 GMT
#1965505

@Newcastle : there are 3 ways of taging multiple disc albums :

1. Tag the title, for example : "Britney Spears compilation CD1", "Britney Spears compilation CD2"... (artist name chosen as an example). It will work without problem with the Encore, but you will get 2 albums displayed with identical covers, and I don't like that, I prefer to have only one cover.

2. Tag the disc using the discnumber tag. That's what I did, it worked with the Sonos... But not with the encore

3. Number tracks as if there was only one disc : if disc 1 ends at number 12, start disc 2 at number 13... That's what I will do. And I think that's the best way, because who cares about disc numbers anyway??? Disc is dead, and the 80min limit too! (you can see that Qobuz sells multiple discs albums with that same numbering scheme)

MB
Offline
Mbee
Bronze
Posted March 14, 2012 at 13:25 GMT
#1965506

A quick note to say that I started to test MOTS yesterday night (it has scanned almost 1/3 of my library) : the result is interesting, as it only uses song characteristics and no "genre" information, I got results which can be said to have some parameters in common musically, but of totally different styles...

I was used to Apple Genius : it's totally different, and I already start to discover hidden songs of my library (iTunes Genius is too much playing the same songs, I think...)

I will see what it does when there will be more songs analysed...

SI
Offline
silpou
Bronze
Posted March 14, 2012 at 13:33 GMT
#1965507

Maybe a MAC mini with itunes were a better choice... If you except the look... ???

MB
Offline
Mbee
Bronze
Posted March 14, 2012 at 14:05 GMT
#1965508

Some would prefer a Mac, I prefer something with a user interface that differs from what I'm using all the day at work. Plus I don't like to listen to always the same songs... mOTS was a key feature for choosing an Encore

HG
Offline
hgitzoller
Bronze
Posted March 14, 2012 at 17:47 GMT
#1965509

Is there already a way to connect the Encore to a ML network? 

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