Easiest is to connect the Mac Mini via optical digital out trough a optical to coaxial digital converter (about £20-50). directly to the Beolab 5's.

This is how I have my current system setup. Works really well.

My BS9000 "controls" my BL5's. You need to use the "CD" source on your 3000, to let the BL5's know to listen for a digital input. Even if you have a CD loaded in your BS3000, the digital signal will automatically override the Powerlink signal coming from your BS3000.

If you do want to listen to your CD's, that's no problem either, just pause iTunes and after a few seconds the BL5's realize there is no digital signal anymore, and flips over to listen to the Powerlink cables.

I also have an iPad to control it all. A great system, which makes me able to save my beloved BS9000, and enjoy the comfort of having all my music stored in lossless quality and easy access in a music library.

I have a setup similar to bayerische's. 

However, I would strongly recommend a sound-card between your Mac mini and the BL5s, to ensure a properly clocked signal, instead of just a straight conversion. It's not complicated at all.

From the Mac mini you run a firewire cable to a unit such as this one:

http://www.tcelectronic.com/impacttwin.asp

It will work as a converter, but you will be feeding it with the Core Audio output from the Mac mini, instead of the Toslink optical, and then you pull a Coax S/PDIF signal from the unit to your BL5s.

Set-up is simple, you use the internal clock sync of the Impact Twin and your speakers will breathe very well.

If you want to get a touch advanced, get Pure Music - it's software for playback which loads the music into the computer's RAM. It accesses the music using iTunes for file management, but it has a better playback engine than QuickTime (proven in many listening tests.) It's quite inexpensive.

As bayerische says, you can control playback from an iPhone or iPad, using Remote or some of the other remote programs available.

It's an excellent solution. 

Interesting point SP.

You think my setup could do with an external soundcard?

No stupidity here.

Back in Beosystem 6500 days, the system was equipped with a coax s/pdif out from the CD-player, marked "for future use." They never used that, as far as I know, until the BeoSound 9000 came along and you could make a connection to a similar port directly to a pair of BL5s (when those were launched.)

However, the B&O codes have a quirk, as described by bayerische: the BL5s look for a signal from the s/pdif connection, and will give priority to that, if detected. If not, they fall back to whatever is coming down the Powerlink. And even if they are decoding an s/pdif signal, you can control the speakers through the Powerlink, to adjust volume, etc.

So this is a work-around where you can attach a non-B&O source, while still being almost entirely inside the B&O control interface.

Most of the time I don't use the Beomaster 7000 that's connected to my BL5s. I have it there when I want to play musicassettes, and then I use the speakers in Option 0. You would want to do the same thing, but you also want to send music to the speakers using the Mac mini.

I haven't tried this with a BeoSound 3000, which has an integrated CD-player, so you would have to experiment as to the coax s/pdif override when you press CD on the remote.

Here's what happens with my setup, when I'm in Option 0 for the BL5s and want music from the Mac mini. I press CD on the remote, the Beomaster 7000 switches on, shows CD on the display and fires up the speakers, if the Mac mini is already playing something, then that's what I hear from the speakers, or else I can just select something with my iPhone or iPad, and that gets the music going.

The Beomaster 6500 is connected via Powerlink to the BL5s.

The Mac mini is connected to the tc electronics soundcard that is the predecessor to the Impact Twin I linked to above. The signal goes from the mini via FireWire, which is the best possible connection for porting music out of a mini. 
The Impact Twin has coax s/pdif OUT, and I just run the regular s/pdif cable from B&O from the soundcard to to one of the speakers, and then daisychain from that to the next.

The advantages of using a soundcard of this kind are many. Given the brilliant resolution of the speakers, you get to feed them the best possible signal, which has been reclocked by the soundcard. The way it is set up, the mini is actually slaved to the soundcard, but controlled from it via a very sensible control panel.

Theoretically, it shouldn't matter whether you convert from Core Audio to Toslink s/pdif, convert that to coax s/pdif and then feed the speakers; but ideally you would want to have as few conversions as possible between source and speakers. Using a soundcard such as the above sends Core Audio (the native audio protocol for the Mac OS, used by professionals in film and music) straight to the soundcard, which then sends a coax s/pdif straight to your speakers, while the soundcard's clock is ensuring as jitter free delivery as it's desirable to have.

soundproof wrote:

No stupidity here.

Back in Beosystem 6500 days, the system was equipped with a coax s/pdif out from the CD-player, marked "for future use." They never used that, as far as I know, until the BeoSound 9000 came along and you could make a connection to a similar port directly to a pair of BL5s (when those were launched.)

However, the B&O codes have a quirk, as described by bayerische: the BL5s look for a signal from the s/pdif connection, and will give priority to that, if detected. If not, they fall back to whatever is coming down the Powerlink. And even if they are decoding an s/pdif signal, you can control the speakers through the Powerlink, to adjust volume, etc.

So this is a work-around where you can attach a non-B&O source, while still being almost entirely inside the B&O control interface.

Most of the time I don't use the Beomaster 7000 that's connected to my BL5s. I have it there when I want to play musicassettes, and then I use the speakers in Option 0. You would want to do the same thing, but you also want to send music to the speakers using the Mac mini.

I haven't tried this with a BeoSound 3000, which has an integrated CD-player, so you would have to experiment as to the coax s/pdif override when you press CD on the remote.

Here's what happens with my setup, when I'm in Option 0 for the BL5s and want music from the Mac mini. I press CD on the remote, the Beomaster 7000 switches on, shows CD on the display and fires up the speakers, if the Mac mini is already playing something, then that's what I hear from the speakers, or else I can just select something with my iPhone or iPad, and that gets the music going.

The Beomaster 6500 is connected via Powerlink to the BL5s.

The Mac mini is connected to the tc electronics soundcard that is the predecessor to the Impact Twin I linked to above. The signal goes from the mini via FireWire, which is the best possible connection for porting music out of a mini. 
The Impact Twin has coax s/pdif OUT, and I just run the regular s/pdif cable from B&O from the soundcard to to one of the speakers, and then daisychain from that to the next.

The advantages of using a soundcard of this kind are many. Given the brilliant resolution of the speakers, you get to feed them the best possible signal, which has been reclocked by the soundcard. The way it is set up, the mini is actually slaved to the soundcard, but controlled from it via a very sensible control panel.

Theoretically, it shouldn't matter whether you convert from Core Audio to Toslink s/pdif, convert that to coax s/pdif and then feed the speakers; but ideally you would want to have as few conversions as possible between source and speakers. Using a soundcard such as the above sends Core Audio (the native audio protocol for the Mac OS, used by professionals in film and music) straight to the soundcard, which then sends a coax s/pdif straight to your speakers, while the soundcard's clock is ensuring as jitter free delivery as it's desirable to have.

 

I'm curious!

While everything you say makes perfect sense, when transferring a digital signal to the BL5 is there really a sound quality benefit in having the intermediate soundcard stage, as it is the clocking of the DAC (internal to the BL5) which dictates the quality/jitter performance rather than the quality of data transfer over the spdif link (assuming of course no complete data dropouts). I would assume (although it's not clear form the service manual) that the transfered data is suitably buffered at the input of the BL5 as it is then processed by the DSP before then being passed to the DAC/Amp.

I can however understand having the soundcard there for electrical isolation reasons, or for use with other speakers whereby the output of the soundcard would then be analogue (from the soundcard DAC) and the souncard clock stability would therefore be significant.

I have several sources going through that soundcard before going to the BL5. I believe that if you're just piping one signal, you might do with a straight conversion.

However - you are going from the Core Audio, to a digital OUT conversion, to the Toslink Optical, to the Toslink/Coax conversion, before the signal goes to the speakers; and you could be going Core Audio>coax s/pdif.

Then it's up to your level of audiophilia nervosa to determine whether you're bothered by the intermediate steps.

soundproof wrote:

Then it's up to your level of audiophila nervosa to determine whether you're bothered by the intermediate steps.

😂 - Fair enough! I'll make sure the soundcard is stood on a suitably large crystal and has a pyramid on top!

Puncher wrote:

I'm curious!

While everything you say makes perfect sense, when transferring a digital signal to the BL5 is there really a sound quality benefit in having the intermediate soundcard stage, as it is the clocking of the DAC (internal to the BL5) which dictates the quality/jitter performance rather than the quality of data transfer over the spdif link (assuming of course no complete data dropouts). I would assume (although it's not clear form the service manual) that the transfered data is suitably buffered at the input of the BL5 as it is then processed by the DSP before then being passed to the DAC/Amp.

I can however understand having the soundcard there for electrical isolation reasons, or for use with other speakers whereby the output of the soundcard would then be analogue (from the soundcard DAC) and the souncard clock stability would therefore be significant.

I don't know the details of exactly how the BeoLab 5s clock, but they'll have to pull it off the S/PDIF connection (not ideal, but it works for just stereo audio). If the BeoLab 5s didn't clock to the sound-card, you'd get clicking/popping at even intervals as the two clocks wander out with each other slightly!

What I couldn't tell you is whether the BeoLab 5s have any sort of jitter-reduction mechanism/circuits.