Certainly with VCRs, B&O were nothing special - Philips or Hitachi things with nice design and a huge profit margin. I learnt that lesson when I paid £750 for the DVD1 dvd player thinking that it was the ultimate player. It turned out to be a basic Pioneer with limited connectivity. It wouldn't play DivX and had no HDMI output. I was a fool buying into that.

Experience has shown that for Video recorders, there is nothing that competes to Panasonic both for performance/engineering & longevity so sadly the B&O was nothing more than a pretty face.

I have to agree with you.  I still use a vcr as have lots of tapes plus I like recording the old way. The digital recorders also seem to have problems sometimes with distortions or even no recording.  I'll dig to find my old Hitachi which has always worked flawlessly.  

Öhm - actually, I've always thought that the VCRs of B&O were pretty darn amazing (not to be compared with the DVD 1 or 2, which were also good from my point of view but nothing special as has already been pointed out). Just like (some of) the cassette decks. I always thought that these were - probably not so well-known to a wider public - areas their quality of picture/sound reproduction was on par with or ahead of the competition. In particular, the VX 7000 was/is great. Let's not forget that you are talking about eventually pretty old products with a lot of turning/moving elements and above all a ton of capacitors in use. It's physics. I doubt that there is any mass manufacturer that can overcome the shortcomings of having such components in use. Of course you can in principle, but the firm would probably not have survived.

Cheers,

Kai

Beocord 8000 is more than 30 years old, right? Maybe one could accept malfunction after all those years? 😎

Both vcrs have not been used a lot.  One started having this problem very soon then the other.  I believe they are cheap and there is a serious design fault in its mechanism. 

I'm sorry but I'll have to disagree with you. I've had other vcrs stored away then re used without any problem. This only happens with B&O. As for the clocks again I had no issues with my other equipment and believe me I've had many.  Even my beotalk 1200 stays behind one minute every week or so. Why? 

Too much of a simple coincidence. 

Bit of an odd one this.  My Beotalk and Beocoms keep perfect time as do all of my B&O items - and believe you me, I have a lot as other members here will testify to. The only time they are incorrect is after a power cut - which we have frequently in France.

However, many of my other appliances from AEG, Panasonic etc do not keep time that well.

All electronic components deteriorate over time, as do rubber components such as belts on drives and wheels, grease dries and siezes components. This is universal and occurs for every brand.  To expect a 30 year old machine to operate flawlessly without any servicing having been in and out of storage for a long time is unreasonable and I wouldn't expect any manufacturers products to be able to do that better than anyone elses.  If I stored a Rolls Royce for 20 years I wouldn't just be able to drive it away without doing all sorts of work - change hoses, fluids, brakes etc etc.  Does that mean that a Rolls Royce is poor quality?

For any brand, some products will be viewed as being 'better, or higher quality' than some others.   You can't deny the quality of TV's such as the 'old' Avant - the picture quality has been described as the best CRT picture available.  Sound and material quality was also excellent as were the features which outstripped most TV's of that time. The same cannot be said of all products - possibly including some VCR's and DVD and HD players - but they too have their strong points with excellent features not found on other machines.

Dave.

Actually, I would say Rolls Royce in a sense is or better used to be poor quality 😕