[beojeff]

Thank you very much for that guide, Geoff. It’s very useful!

I’d like to offer a bit of feedback: When manually adjusting for the speaker level in a Listening Position, the tone that the Theatre generates is too faint. It’s really difficult to get a good reading with a decibel meter. The Beosystem 4, on the other hand, generated a very audible tone to capture a speaker’s level on a  decibel meter. Hopefully, the issue will be fixed such that we can indicate the speaker model attached to a Receiver 1 so that manual value entry won’t be necessary.

[beojeff]

I do wonder if the LG’s home control could be added to the Theatre’s list of sources on the Beoremote 1. Just trying to help a bit.

[beojeff]

MM,

Have you taken a look at your LG TV’s home control section? It provides some pretty nice control of your Hue lights. I know it’s not the convenience of a Beoremote 1 that you want, but in the meantime it provides some control similar to the BLGW/BLI home control overlay provided through compatible Beovisions and Theatre.

[beojeff]

I just looked on the LG home screen and see Home Dashboard is “powered by ThinQ AI.” I’m not really sure quite what that means. Perhaps it’s connected with Home Kit?

[beojeff]

The current LG TVs already provide the ability to control Hue lights and Ikea Tradfri lights and much more. Does anyone know how this has been implemented?

[beojeff]

I manually entered the correct bass redirection level values for when adding a Beolab 2 subwoofer connected to a Receiver 1. That made a HUGE difference to my comparisons that I made last weekend with and without a Beolab 2 subwoofer. After adding the correct values, the bass sounded much more natural and pleasing.

I must say it again in case anyone at B&O is reading: We really do need for B&O to put into the app a way for us to indicate what model of Beolab is attached to a Receiver 1 so that Room Sense can provide the proper calculations.

[beojeff]

Millemissen wrote:

This could – at least theoretically – mean that, if you are not into the automation stuff….and just want to control e.g. Hue lights, this might be possible with the BROne/Halo using a Mozart product as the hub. No need for a BLI in that particular case anymore, then! Or am I expecting too much? MM

I suspect that you’re partly true — and that might be enough. The article in the link indicates the we could control devices with Matter with the Beoremote One favorite buttons. This would make it pretty simple to trigger light scenes. E.g., Bright, Relax, and TV Viewing scenes with Hue. Just a handful of scenes can be very useful and maybe enough for most people. However, I wouldn’t expect to see the type of deep control that you can get with a BLI — such as being able to control the light level of each lamp. I could be wrong. Maybe adding Matter support to the Theatre would give us a new sublist under List on the remote for “Hue Lights” that would give us a list of all lamps and scenes.

I think that the Halo is a different matter. Forgive the pun. The extra menus on the Halo are all highly customizable and edited by the BLI. It seems that that level would need the deep control of the BLI.

[beojeff]

In the area where you initially add speakers generally, you have to scroll down past wireless speaker setup and wired speaker setup and then you see setup for third party speakers.

I’m interested to know anything has been changed so that we can assign what the speaker model is connected to a Receiver 1 so that it can be used in Room Sense.

[beojeff]

I see there’s a new app update today that adds headphone support for the Theatre and manual speaker setup. It looks like there is now a place to add third-party speakers when adding speakers. Also, there are two new speaker roles “left downmix” and “right downmix” with this annoying scrolling list at the bottom of that page that covers up part of the page.I can’t seem to figure out what those two new speaker roles are for. Has anyone noticed any other differences?

[beojeff]

I set up an extra Listening Position to be able to do some comparisons between using 7.0.4 with the fronts and rears being BL9 speakers and using 7.1.4 adding a Beolab 2 subwoofer with the same setup. Adding the BL2 definitely adds more overall warm bass to the sound. However, I feel that adding the BL2 takes away from the sense of surround sound. I used the movie “Lucy” for the comparisons. This is one of the movies that has been recommended for its use of Dolby Atmos. I’m wondering if the diminished sense of surround is due to the capabilities of the Beolab 2, if the bass of the four Beolab 9 speakers without any additional subwoofer just works better for surround sound, or if I have all of the settings entered manually in advanced settings for the Beolab 2 connected via Receiver 1 are just wrong and that has a big impact on the surround sound. I suspect Geoff Martin would have some interesting explanations about this. I really hope that B&O gets the Receiver 1 support properly implemented so that I could just rely on Room Sense to take care of all of the settings.

[beojeff]

There could be a different solution for you. I’ve been considering the project of using a spare 3500 above a jacuzzi in my bedroom. For my project, I’ve considered using an NL/ML Converter with a ML Power Box — that’s the very tiny box that you must connect to the NL/ML Converter when there is no ML Audio or Video Master present. This would give you the AUX input of the NL/ML Converter as well as any sources such as Deezer, TuneIn, etc. that you get if you have any NL product such as just an inexpensive Beoplay M3. This would give you a great deal of flexibility of source buttons to which you could map the sources. Now that I have an extra NL/ML Converter and ML Power Box I have everything that I would need for the project.

[beojeff]

I’ve been comparing the same, myself. I believe I notice richer colors when streaming directly though the LG apps. Yet, the video on the Apple TV seems more natural. I’m not quite sure which is actually better.

[beojeff]

We shall agree to shake hands and laugh, my friend.

[beojeff]

I will humble myself in admitting that I’m not innocent in not getting the most out of something. I never drive my Porsche over 60 MPH and asked my Porsche dealer about the convenience in having just one set of all-season tires. He gasped.

[beojeff]

Mr. Ten Percent, please know that I respect you, and I certainly envy you for having BL90s and a Kaleidescape. However, you’re just not going to convince me that it doesn’t matter about getting the best possible sound format. I know this is an extreme example, but you’d certainly notice a difference between playing a VHS tape through your BL90s and playing a UHD disc with object-based lossless sound through your 90s.

[beojeff]

A word of advice to getting the best possible sound out of your Theatre: Do not assume that just popping a disc in the player and pressing “play” will give you the best sound. Be mindful of your audio setting of the disc. Some studios do not play the Dolby Atmos track by default. For example, the UHD of “Bond” movies and UHD of “Game of Thrones” will not default to Dolby Atmos. Soon after receiving my Theatre, I sat through “No Time to Die” and only realized near the end when I checked the sound format through the B&O app that it was playing the Dolby 7.1 lossless track. Granted, the sound was fantastic. However, when I changed the audio setting of the disc to Dolby Atmos and rewatched a few scenes, I was truly blown away by the improvement.

[beojeff]

P.S. On that same “Jason Bourne” disc, the Spanish track is DTS-HD (lossless but not object-based) and the French track is DTS Digital Surround (lossy). So there can be quite a variety of audio tracks on one disc that are not of the same quality.

[beojeff]

I went to a pile of movies and pulled a couple as an example.

The US boxed set of “A Discovery of Witches” has DTS-HD MA only. Absolutely no Dolby options. If you’r player can decode and send in LPCM, you’re fine — but no if it doesn’t. The UHD of the movie “Jason Bourne” offers audio in DTS-X but no Dolby versions. If your player can decode and send the audio to the Theatre via LPCM, you’ll get a downmix that is not object-based. However, as it stands now we cannot get the full object-based audio (DTS:X) at all through the Theatre. This is why B&O needs to support DTS on the Theatre.

[beojeff]

I’m afraid that you’re still confusing things. There are two competing formats: Dolby and DTS. Each has lossy, lossless, and object-based versions. Object-based is more than just height channels. Some object-based soundtracks do not even use height channels. Discs often support some versions of both Dolby and DTS, but many offer lossless or object-based in only Dolby or DTS and not both. So we have to chose which soundtrack. B&O should just support both Dolby and DTS so that we’ll always be able to get the best soundtrack.

There is a huge difference in quality that you get between lossy and lossless. Why would you spend the money on BL90s and a Kaleidescape system if you’re not going to get the best sound from your system?

[beojeff]

I think what we can take away from this is that understanding the formats can be (unnecessarily) confusing when the user just wants it to work and enjoy the best possible sound.

There’s a mentality that since all streaming services only use Dolby and not DTS that DTS support is unnecessary. This could be true for someone using streaming with just the TV’s internal speakers or a cheap soundbar. However, the Theatre should be much more than just a cheap soundbar. With the high performance of B&O speakers, we can really take advantage of the best sound possible and let our B&O speakers shine.

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