Hi David!

I havn't heard the BL9s BUT i've heard many B&Os and i've also worked in dance music radio since 1995!

From experience, i'd say it's B&Os fault here. They are a flat sounding maybe as some put it 'natural' sounding manufacturer. I recognise the B&O sound it's kind of warm. It's very Radio 2!!! This sounds great as you've pointed out with jazz, classical BUT as I found a little dead. lifeless with dance. Again, this was is my kind of music too.

Their systems are refined! A bit Prince Charles like! It's a bit like when he tried to breakdance and didn't quite pull it off!

Some may argue that today's music is produced for the headphone / MP3 music. Maybe, but it still does indeed sound great!

I think Seanie would agree with me also on this. I'm not knocking the sound - it's neutral but dance music needs a little more oooooomph!  A system that's a bit more Prince Harry than Charles!

What I should emphasize though is if you love music, look beyond the production values and enjoy the music...

I would point to the CD production (and to be clear here, I mean the actual recording, not the player) - we have discussed the "loudness" war several times on this forum, very few modern music releases have natural dynamics and most are compressed (in the amplitude sense rather than the digital space saving sense) to death in order to maximise rms "volume" off the CD. The end result is a recording with no dynamics (difference between quiet and loud) and, typically, clipped to death. This can be easily seen by ripping a track into any decent audio editor.

The net result of the above is that the music is very difficult to listen to over any period of time - common adjectives describing such recordings include "harsh" and "tiring". Some producers have spoken out against it and hopefully if will go away in the future as the fashion fades and new music or reissues will again be mastered by a more sensistve pair of ears.

Your system is fine - well recorded, lively music will sound just that - a loud, distorted, flat mess will sound very poor.

What a pile of rubbish ..... Just kidding 😁,

there is no good or bad music, just personal preferences,but I have to say  (all hardcore B&O including myself - look away now! 😐) 😜 )

As long time AV enthusiast and back at the day DJ I wouldn't even attempt to use any of manufactured speakers for my venues and build them myself to specific requirements. Some of the aspects are down to basics of physics and limits of drivers in producing waves at given frequency (Yes we did measured perception of people to sound 20-20000Hz is out of physical reach of most humans, hence irrelevant whatsoever)  I used to work as AV instructor in HI-Fi club and designed & build many systems (speakers in particular) what with entered national competitions back then 🙁 Now I'm just old grumpy man - therefore don't think that the little bands in our devices are good enough to respond to the stream of 010101 and play to our liking (is it working like that, right?)

Something like Technics RS7000 would do the job nicely and do B&O's sound "flat" yes they do and are they better speakers or systems for that matter out there - of course they are! And finally are CD's crap these days - of course they're the sound is digitalized and than again converted into electrical audio waves (obviously the quality of this process would depend on coding and decoding) = I would go as far as present if you remember reasons given for ruling out analogue TV - exceptional quality and so on - sorry but on analogue I never had bunch of pixels instead of picture and high pitch squeaky noises instead of sound, did you?

Being Music "lover" and B&O enthusiast mustn't necessarily go hand in hand and us whom collect and enjoy them do that for many different reasons & many are very happy with the sound they produce.

On personal note Paul W - your analogy to Royals may be a miss to many unaware of "break dance attempt" of certain royal ;)

Peace

bob

Paul W wrote:

Hi David!

I havn't heard the BL9s BUT i've heard many B&Os and i've also worked in dance music radio since 1995!

From experience, i'd say it's B&Os fault here. They are a flat sounding maybe as some put it 'natural' sounding manufacturer. I recognise the B&O sound it's kind of warm. It's very Radio 2!!! This sounds great as you've pointed out with jazz, classical BUT as I found a little dead. lifeless with dance. Again, this was is my kind of music too.

Their systems are refined! A bit Prince Charles like! It's a bit like when he tried to breakdance and didn't quite pull it off!

Some may argue that today's music is produced for the headphone / MP3 music. Maybe, but it still does indeed sound great!

I think Seanie would agree with me also on this. I'm not knocking the sound - it's neutral but dance music needs a little more oooooomph!  A system that's a bit more Prince Harry than Charles!

What I should emphasize though is if you love music, look beyond the production values and enjoy the music...

I'm with Puncher on this one - many CDs are just badly produced and designed to be loud with little in the way of dynamics. Beolab 9s are fine speakers and I cannot ever think of them being flat. I would always make sure they are set up correctly - most seem to be set up in free space mode and then stuck in a corner! It always amuses me that people differentiate between different music types. They all use notes! The ability to reproduce good sound should not really vary on the type of music playing. What may vary is the expectation of the listener. If you want pummelling bass and shreiking highs then one probably needs a non B&O enclosure.

I'm on it with you guys - it used to be good way of checking quality of recording - called linear or direct  (if the sound from record, tape, cd or anything else for that matter was in some aspects unbalanced - it wasn't worth listening to with use of equalisers, or and even Hi-End equipment.

Every thing these days is produced with main aspect in focus = profit (there simply isn't pride or warranty of quality any more... some may say it's to make it cheap - I do disagree, taking into account 2/3 of world haven't got such an issues, but rather simple survival ;)

Peace

Peter wrote:

I'm with Puncher on this one - many CDs are just badly produced and designed to be loud with little in the way of dynamics. Beolab 9s are fine speakers and I cannot ever think of them being flat. I would always make sure they are set up correctly - most seem to be set up in free space mode and then stuck in a corner! It always amuses me that people differentiate between different music types. They all use notes! The ability to reproduce good sound should not really vary on the type of music playing. What may vary is the expectation of the listener. If you want pummelling bass and shreiking highs then one probably needs a non B&O enclosure.

in my eyes (rubbish in rubbish out) what you loose at the start of the chain,can not be rescued at the end.

I mean, poor recordings will sound compressed, ,fine on ipods etc but not on a expensive,

revealing playback system,which is main objective,is to reproduce all the information as accurately as possible.

I listened to all genres,and have heard good cds and bad,the speakers in my eyes should not colour the sound at all,you should hear it as the artist intended.

my 2 cents

Peter wrote:

Beolab 9s are fine speakers and I cannot ever think of them being flat.

Just nitpicking, for clarities sake, but I assume you mean that you don't think they're  "flat" in the "sounding dead" sense, rather than questioning their frequency response?

Exactly!

butch1 wrote:

in my eyes (rubbish in rubbish out) what you loose at the start of the chain,can not be rescued at the end.

I mean, poor recordings will sound compressed, ,fine on ipods etc but not on a expensive,

revealing playback system,which is main objective,is to reproduce all the information as accurately as possible.

I listened to all genres,and have heard good cds and bad,the speakers in my eyes should not colour the sound at all,you should hear it as the artist intended.

my 2 cents

 

Agree..! A lot of todays music is produced to sound good on docking stations/earphones.
Lots of bass and treble -not much detail in the mid-range.
Another 'advantage' by this is that you can't tell as big a difference when converted into mp3, as when a good quality recording is converted.
(and, Yes - a lot of people still do listen to low quality mp3 files...they don't even care about losless/FLAC etc...)
Its more about quantity than quality.