After reading this thread I did a little casual A/B testing on my Flac files.

1.      BV Eclipse feeding BL90s via Powerlink from a Melco N1 Music Server

2.      Auralic Aries G2 feeding BL90 via USB from a Melco N1 Music Server

Just so were clear…this (2) is absolutely night and day in terms of dynamics, musicality whatever over (1).

Night and day.

Now taking the common factors out, an Auralic Aries G2 (with Lightning Link) is £4k. However, the G1 which is sonically the same but without the Link is half that. Both have internal HDD bays for X Gb if that is what you want.

If I recall correctly, the moment was cruising at £1800-2000. So were not talking polar opposites. The Auralic is built like a tank (milled Al mono-chassis and good RFI isolation).

I think we have to get past what is on offer in terms of sources and services from B&O as “Adequate”. 

It is not.

It is (has fallen) falling seriously behind to a point that should raise a lot of questions from us all.

Mr 10Percent wrote:

After reading this thread I did a little casual A/B testing on my Flac files.

1. BV Eclipse feeding BL90s via Powerlink from a Melco N1 Music Server

2. Auralic Aries G2 feeding BL90 via USB from a Melco N1 Music Server

Just so were clear…this (2) is absolutely night and day in terms of dynamics, musicality whatever over (1).

Night and day.

Now taking the common factors out, an Auralic Aries G2 (with Lightning Link) is £4k. However, the G1 which is sonically the same but without the Link is half that. Both have internal HDD bays for X Gb if that is what you want.

If I recall correctly, the moment was cruising at £1800-2000. So were not talking polar opposites. The Auralic is built like a tank (milled Al mono-chassis and good RFI isolation).

I think we have to get past what is on offer in terms of sources and services from B&O as “Adequate”.

It is not.

It is (has fallen) falling seriously behind to a point that should raise a lot of questions from us all.

I bought a beosound 5 last year and it's now my favourite piece of B&O.
My internet is fairly wonky because of construction in my neighbourhood so streaming is just not dependable. It will be like this for another year at least.

Once our workday is over, both me and my wife stop using our phones. We have a landline for talking to family and friends.
Last thing we want to do is spend more time on small screens.

I would love B&O to take something like an Auralic with its capabilities and put it in a BS5.
What I love is the physical interface and the cover art it shows while playing. It's just a nice little bit of kit.
Since working from home, the BS5 is on in the background from 6.30AM to about 7pm. Every day. Playing radio in the morning, in the afternoon my library of songs or the Amazon Echo plugged into it if we want to stream from the service of our choice.

Nothing is perfect, but this works well enough for us, true audiophile will never be happy with anything. 
Been there, done that, got over it. 

Not arguing about physical media, thats not the point being debated.

Its about them offering a more fully featured streaming transport (i.e a Core type box), and alongside a more browsing friendly Halo type of control interface, wrapped in a cool B&O design. There are clearly those who would value at least the latter.

After all, they do both of these already - just pretty restrictive (the Core), and pretty limited (the Halo).

Streaming from a phone is perfectly fine with the single point speakers (A9, Balance, BS1,2 etc etc).

Once you have Beolabs,. especially the more expensive ones, they should offer something to complement the experience of 10 / 20 / 30 / 50 thousand pound speakers.

Michael wrote:

I haven’t used a CD or vinyl as primary medium for decades now. I mainly play music from my phone or other computers.

 

 

The music however is reproduced by the magical speakers from Bang & Olufsen and I don’t think that is a bad thing.

 

 

Why put devices that takes up space when not necessary any more? Much easier to just not have a music station visible if not necessary and if necessary then it shall be beautiful and intriguing to use.