Hey there, 

 

I have been enjoying my Core-motored system for some time now and love it! ♥ Now, I finally get my range of speakers to work fully, after a long battle with Essence MK1 that almost ruined my joy of audiophile life 🙃 Things rock now! Have a sublime summer! 

I agree with all the good things already written about the Core.

It is central to my B&O setup, I use it on a daily basis and it does the job on all fronts: high sound quality and flawless for all sources I use such as Deezer HiFi, TuneIn, Airplay 2, occasionally Chromecast and non-B&O TV. It is most of the time the master of my Beolink multiroom and sound is always distributed in sync without any cuts.

Caveats: Since software 1.7, on mine, Beolink multiroom is impacted by daily scheduled reboots (a feature that we cannot disable) in a way that beolink multiroom is no longer usable (Core cannot join or be joined by any other products) until the Core is manually restarted. I have a case opened with B&O since 3 months, I have provided a lot of evidences and I have identified exactly when the problem occurs thanks to the Core logs and other tools I have used. B&O are working on the issue but no good news so far, they claim I'm the only one to have reported the issue, so I'm looking for other evidences from other Core users in a beolink multiroom environment, please.

 

I enjoy my Core but as noted in another thread of mine, I dislike that it does not have native support for TIDAL, Qobuz and other high-rez streaming services. This means I must stream TIDAL to my Core from my iPhone over Airplay, which is limited innately to 44.1/16, which is very disappointing. B&O should include native support for high-rez music services given the price and quality of its speakers.

 

I have a Bluesound Node 2i arriving today to try in place of my Core. I will keep it and sell my Core if I can hear a difference in the 96/24 native support for high-rez music.

Besides this, I enjoy my Core overall. Occasionally it is a little buggy and requires a power cycle. But overall it works well.

I’m curious to know more about how you have your BS Core setup along with how you select the various audio sources to play sound from?

I plan on connecting a non-B&O TV via toslink to my a BS Core, then toslink to a set of BL 20s. I do also plan on connecting an old Beogram turntable to the BS Core through a preamp gia RCA. Finally, I plan on being able to stream to the BS Core via Airplay 2 using our iOS devices.

I’m unsure about how you select which source for the BSC to use (TV, turntable or Airplay) since I do not have a B&O remote. Can this be done from the B&O app? Do you recommend I get an IR B&O remote to help facilitate this & volume control?

Your help is greatly appreciated! 

aodgaard wrote:

I plan on connecting a non-B&O TV via toslink to my a BS Core, then toslink to a set of BL 20s. I do also plan on connecting an old Beogram turntable to the BS Core through a preamp gia RCA. Finally, I plan on being able to stream to the BS Core via Airplay 2 using our iOS devices.

I’m unsure about how you select which source for the BSC to use (TV, turntable or Airplay) since I do not have a B&O remote. Can this be done from the B&O app? Do you recommend I get an IR B&O remote to help facilitate this & volume control?

The Core has only one physical input port: Line-In/Optical, so you'll not be able to physically connect both the TV and the preamp to it unless you use a magic box in between to handle that (I've no clue if such box exist)

With the B&O App you can select internal sources (when configured) such as Deezer, TuneIn, Line-In/Optical, Spotify, Bluetooth (I have not tested the last two) or sources from another B&O linked product.

Airplay cannot be selected by the App. When an IOS device (or other Airplay source) transmits to the Core, it switches automatically to Airplay.

Note: The Core switches automatically to the last activated source and stops/pauses the previous source, e.g. if you are listening to an Airplay source and bring the device connected to the Line-In port on, then it will stop the Airplay stream to switch to the Line-In source.

While you can operate the Core with the App only, the Essence remote is a perfect companion for it at a smaller price than other more recent B&O remotes. With it you can control the volume and navigate from one source to another cyclically.

Thank you for the quick response & the detail on the Core’s behavior when moving between sources. 

The Essence is a good recommendation and will look to purchase one.

It also looks like I need to figure out how I will get my turntable to also work in conjunction with the other sources.

One last question if you don’t mind, can you power down your speakers by powering down the BS Core? 

If you have a volume regulated preamp you can just connect the record player directly from the preamp to the speakers. And yes, if the core switches off the speakers will too. The speakers automatically shut down with other inputs if there is no signal for a set amount of time.

aodgaard wrote:

The Essence is a good recommendation and will look to purchase one.

Just be aware that the Essence remote has no display, it is only used to control the volume, to pause/stop a source, to navigate from one source to another (you need to remember the order of the local sources you defined in the Core), to change next/previous track/radio station and to put the Core in sleep mode.

It is not mandatory, but it is a very stylish companion to the Core

… and if you are a Siri fan, you can leverage it control the music streamed to your Core and more.