“Hey Google, play the Beogram” ;-)

[Steve at Sounds Heavenly]

Good morning Beoworlders,

I thought you may be interested to see what is possibly the best Bang & Olufsen home in the World…

Welcome to BeoHome in Struer, Denmark, the apartment where even a 30 year old record player can be voice controlled!

Kind regards, Steve.

[pepps]

That home cinema room – still picking my jaw up off the floor.
Staggering.

[Curly]

As I said in our Discord forum, I’m very curious how they are managing all the processing and multichannel decoding without a Beovision. B&O doesn’t make an AVR currently. Must be some type of third-party solution but… that being the likely case… does it seem a bit disingenuous to showcase a theater like that which requires either a component not available for sale or third-party products to allow for the integration?

 

That said… amazing looking, overkill in the best way, and I’d love to watch an action movie there. 🙂

[Steve at Sounds Heavenly]

Hi,

Sorry I don’t know what processing is done behind the scenes here. I don’t think there is anything wrong with combining B&O’s expertise (TVs, speakers, headphones, etc) with the best that other high-end tech companies can offer. We don’t expect B&O to make their own lighting or motorised window shades, but we know any good B&O store can provide a fully integrated setup with lighting and window control from your B&O remote. The same is true with this theatre room. B&O speakers work seamlessly with other brands of projector, lighting and audio processor.

Yes, it would be nice if B&O made everything, but that probably isn’t realistic. This way, the things that need to be “B&O quality” get the attention they require and the whole system looks and operates as though every part were a B&O product.

I love this cinema and they had a lot of trouble trying to remove me when the demo was finished 😉

Kind regards, Steve.

[OlivierC]

Hi Steve,

thank you for the video, it is impressive!

I really did like the remotely controlled Beogram. 

My guess: BG —> Beomaster —> ML/NL adapter —> Core?

About the cinema room: I’m not asking B&O to make everything but I’m also wondering how they managed the sound processing without a BV.

Another question is about the BV Harmony.
The current BV’s have B&O sound processing “only”, so how is it possible to control the motorised screen positioning by scene?
I thought this option was lost since BS4-based BV phased out.
Back then it was possible to have different positioning and speaker configuration based on the source (e.g. when listening to BG then the screen was off and hold still using only stereo speakers, when watching tv, the BV moved towards the viewer using all the speakers etc.).

Maybe I’m just confused (sorry!), any suggestion would be appreciated.

Again, thanks for the great video!

Olivier

[Steve at Sounds Heavenly]

Hi Olivier,

I will follow up with a video in the coming weeks explaining exactly how to control a Beogram from Google or Alexa. Beolink Intelligence is used to combine scenes with TV and motor stand control as far as I am aware.

Kind regards, Steve.

[Millemissen]

OliverC is right…that is the signal chain (which also includes a MCL to ML Converter in order to integrate the MCL Beomaster to the ML chain).
The Beolink Gateway (as well as the newer Beolink Intelligence) makes the voice controlling possible.
Means no magic……but clever programming combined with the linking possibilities built-in to the Bang & Olufsen products.
Something that you would want that more B&O dealers would/could showcase!

In the cinema room they are using a Trinnov Altitude audio processor (unless they have changed that lately). This advanced processor – amongst a lot of other things – makes it possible to set up several different speaker groups like we also know it from the BSys4 respectively the Sound Center of the newer BV’s.
This way B&O can showcase different multichannel Beolab setups in the same room.
The Trinnov processor can also be integrated with the Beolink Gateway for creating different scenes (lightning, screen etc) as Steve told us in the video.

All in all that room is a further development, a perfection of what a B&O setup has been able to since the days of the Beosystem 3/cinema options.

 

@Steve

Thanks for the video – I have been looking forward to it ?

 

MM

[Guy]

Great video thanks Steve!

You mentioned being able to use the trusty BL1000 to control the lights.  Does anything else in the house respond to IR?

Unless at A.OPT 0, I assume that the BM/BG6500 can be controlled by IR, but only once it has been selected as a source via the MCL/ML link mentioned above.  Does FM radio work? ?

[Steve at Sounds Heavenly]

Thanks!

Yes, the FM radio should work as normal if an aerial is connected (sorry I didn’t think to check this!)

As there aren’t any other IR-based B&O products in the BeoHome, it would be necessary to program the Beoliving Intelligence to translate any incoming IR codes received from the Beomaster via the NL/ML Converter, eg. TV, LIGHT, etc and assign them to outgoing network commands.  I’m not aware of any other controls being configured to work from IR, but maybe one of the B&O Integration team will read this and respond!

By the way, I will follow up in the next few weeks with a “deep dive” video explaining exactly how to voice control a Beogram from Google or Alexa (Siri is also possible, but a different process, so not sure that is worth covering).

Kind regards, Steve.

[Guy]

Thanks Steve – that all makes sense!

To be honest I am a big fan of ‘one button press for a source’, hence why I like using B&O IR remotes. I am not sure that I could be fussed with scrolling through menus across the X and Y axis like in the Halo! (Not surprisingly, I also dislike using a mobile phone to operate an AV system ?).

[AdamS]

The idea of shouting “Hey” anything to control something just makes my teeth itch.

The only way I would ever consider any form of voice control is if someone invents a setup that doesn’t repsond unless you say “please” and will turn it off again if you don’t say “thankyou” within 10 seconds of the item starting.

[Steve at Sounds Heavenly]

Hi AdamS,

I’m with you on that one, the voice assistant is disabled on all of my smart devices!  However, for those who are happy to shout at their speakers, you can ensure that Google voice assistant only responds when you ask nicely, by changing the wake name from “Google” to “Google Please” in the settings.  Then you would have to say “Hey Google, please play the Beogram”…. 😉

Kind regards, Steve.

[Author]

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