I am currently restoring a set of Beolab Penta 1s (actually they should maybe be called 1.5s as they have the crossovers from the later Pentas). Currently the speakers have been done (refoaming midranges mainly, and are being run passively as Beovox Pentas, driven from my BM5000 system while I work on the amplifiers. 

Looking through the various post on Pentas on this forum, it is clear that the Penta 1 can only be driven directly from BM5000 without driving the displays, either from the line level outputs (sensible) or the speaker level outputs (silly really, why add another amplifier into the signal chain?). To get the displays to work needs a BM5500 or later, but that requires the use of speaker-level connections as the BM5500 does not have a line-level preamp output. Anyway, conventional wisdom says the BM5000 was better than the 5500, so I want to keep with that while I can.

However, looking carefully at the schematics, the BM5000 has an MCL connection on the speaker A sockets, and I was wondering if anyone knows what happens if you drive the datalink input on the Pentas (pin 1 on connector P7, which comes direct from one of the data pins on the 4-pin speaker connector) from the MCL output? I would assume that B&O used at least similar messaging protocols, if not identical, for MCL and Datalink?

Has anyone tried this? Or does anyone know that there is a reason it won't work?

Pete