Reply To: Beosound and Conventional HT Equipment

[trackbeo]

Since this question has sat for a week without answers,…  Because I run an old Denon AVR-4310CI and various B&O equipment, but not mixed(*), I don’t strictly qualify to answer you.  Nevertheless:

1) You should read Geoff Martin’s blog post on this topic, particularly latency when mixing speakers, if you haven’t already:  https://www.tonmeister.ca/wordpress/2017/12/06/bo-tech-beolab-loudspeakers-and-third-party-systems/

His comment about the impossibility of setting speaker distance to a very large number in the AVR *probably* (but not certainly) also applies to Audyssey and Dirac measuring a distance and then deciding “that can’t be right”.  If B&O ever get the Mozart platform speakers to work with the Theatre, they will have to implement a lower-latency set of filters than they now have — or, more likely, a mode that turns their own DSP off entirely and lets the Theatre supply an appropriately delayed & EQ’ed signal. So for now, I wouldn’t use Mozart platform speakers with AVRs.  (No personal experience; maybe Audyssey and Dirac have been designed to support abritrary delays, but buffering many channels of audio must have *some* practical limit.)

2) I’ve seen multiple AVR reviews say things like “beware line-level out vs. speaker out is all or nothing”, i.e. you can switch all of the outputs to use the RCA jacks or none of them — except for the fancier models.  So test your AVR if you plan to mix BeoVox (or any passive) speakers with BeoLab (self-amplified) ones.  That said, my 4310CI “External Power Amplifier” option does not seem to have any menu setting to choose, and the manual merely warns not to use both outputs at the same time — which implies that they are all always active.  (I’m sorry I don’t have the oomph to set everything up to see if Audyssey applies to the line-outs or only the speaker-outs, but except for annoying license restrictions I see no reason why it would not: the line-out is merely a feed from the wires to that channel’s amplifier board.)

Good luck, and please post (& photo!-) what you end up using for the AVR & the various channels.

(*) I have run them combined but only in the simplest way: using a Beovision 10 as a monitor from the AVR, with 5.1 Definitive Technology Mythos speakers.  But that doesn’t take any great leap of tech support, being all old-fashioned HD & Dolby Digital, not 4K & Atmos.