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^^^ What he said.
Line-in is available in non-Google Voice Activation (GVA) models. I have my turntable connected to my Balances and it works great – auto-senses the input and audio can be network linked to other B&O devices.
I should add that there is a delay between dropping the needle and hearing sound from the speakers so don’t bother connecting a TV to the Balance because the sound will not synch.
One more thought… you might want to also consider the BL8s.
I have a stereo pair of Balances, and they work great. They have “hiccupped” perhaps 5 times in the 2 years that I have owned them. The symptoms are that one or both do not work, and neither are reachable from the app. Re-booting one or both sometimes fixes it, although I have had to drop and re-add to the app maybe twice.
I take this to be the world of software we live in today. I do have them hardwired to each other and my router, and, oddly enough, they might be more stable running wirelessly. I say this because at least once (maybe twice), I had to disconnect them from the ethernet to get them to recovery from their failed state.
From a sound quality perspective, they are fabulous. I think they sound almost as good as (and sometimes better than) my BL1s with much better bass.
The beam width control does not work when they are stereo paired. Stereo pairing puts them into the “front” mode and you cannot change them to left/right/omni. The left / right / omni does work pretty well with an individual / non-stereo paired unit.
Prior to the balances, I did have a pair of A1s, but they were much too fiddley. Sounded very nice when they worked, but having to set them up every time, and their frequent drop-outs made them not a good long term solution.
Also want to add that they are quite expensive (maybe obvious), and, at times, I think they are overkill for my office. If the Emerge or A5 were available when I was looking to upgrade, I might have chosen those… but then I have not heard either of those speakers so I have no idea how they compare. The Balances can get quite loud before they start getting “screechy” from the ABL turning down the bass to save the drivers. I still often look forward to listening to my Balances which says a lot, I think.
Overall, I am very happy with them.
Stan
On my BS9000, both A.MEM and A.AUX turn on the AUX input. Perhaps the BS5 is the same.
My Eclipse got a new panel under warranty. I watched the repairman do the swap. I would not attempt unless you have specific instructions. It wasn’t just taking off the old panel and putting on the new one. It was taking off the old panel, swapping a bunch of parts from old to new, and then puting the new panel on. I mean none of it looked too difficult – no special tools, just a screwdriver / maybe a torx wrench and removing / adding the panel is 2 person job lifting and centering, However, knowing which parts need to be swapped in which order would probably be hard to figure out and easy to miss something.
I assume the ads are embedded in the radio stream by the radio station. For one station, I mostly get ads about the audicy app which is the preferred app for the station. For the local classical music station, there’s always an ad for a bank that is major sponsor. It’s also doesn’t happen with all stations.
Interesting about the Tune-in app. I almost always get ads when I use GVA which usually uses Tune-in. For example, I’ll get an ad sometimes before I play Radio Paradise on Tune-in, but never B&O Radio. I would say it definitely varies by station and possibly location.
Stan
6 December 2023 at 16:53 in reply to: How do you live with the Bang & Olufsen app and the music? #51103That looks very nice. Good job! You’re inspiring me to do something more than digging out my phone all the time.
Stan
Pressing the Join button on the Balance plays the last source I played on the Balance. I must have enabled the new interface? I haven’t paid too much for attention to these interfaces since usually I use the app or my Essense remote since I find the the “physical” buttons on the units to be too finicky.
Figured it out…
It is the “Product Controlled by Apps” setting. I had it set to “ML Audiomaster” (ML source plays automatically) when it should be “BeoLink Converter NL/ML speakers” (ML source does not play automatically). Since I don’t have speakers connect to my BLC, I thought I needed to select the “ML Audiomaster”, but this is not true.
When I start a ML source on the BLC, the Balance can join. When I start a ML source on the BS1, the Balance cannot join even though it shows up in the multi-room device list.
Next question is that when I start a source on the BLC, the audio also plays on the speakers of the ML device. For example, I select N.Music on the BLC, my BS5 starts playing on its connected speakers. I thought it was supposed to behave like a BL3500 or BL Active where I select N.Music and it only plays on the BL3500 / BL Active (unless I also activate the BS5 speakers).
Is there a BLC or BS5 config setting somewhere that can make it not automatically play when the BLC source is selected? This is annoying because the audio on the NL side is delayed from the ML side.
I can see the Balance in the multi-room display under the BLC in the app. However, when I select it, it doesn’t “join”. The app thinks about it for a few second, but does nothing.
Can you send ML sources to your Emerge?
My family has long given me crap about how *hard* it is to use B&O equipment. My son likes to say that it is annoyingly different for the sake of being different… as in, there’s no value in its differentness. I learned a long time ago that it’s a waste of time to argue about UXs… people like what they like (and dislike what they dislike).
My answer to them has always been that B&O is mostly easy and intuitive if you have never used any AV equipment before. So, step 1 to learning B&O is to forget everything you already know about AV equipment. Most of these UX “standards” that Luke’s hand mentions probably were not standard when B&O first decided that a red dot means “standby” and “Go” means “Play”. I know my first turntable and cassette deck used “Play”… I don’t recall the triangle showing up until maybe the walkman, and then it took 5 – 10 years before it became “standard” (of course, I’m getting on in years so my memory may be spotty). Having chosen their path back in the 70s, they stuck with it.
About the “no thought” on the button layout of the BeoRemote, from all the examples shown on this thread, only the B&O remotes have the numbers in a logically useful order. Everybody else goes from 1 at the top left to 9 that the bottom right. Meanwhile, B&O has 1 at the bottom left and 9 at the top right. Why does this matter? At least in my experience, I select a lot more channels that start with 1 – 3 vs. 4 – 9. Therefore, on average, my finger doesn’t have to reach as far vs the “standard” numeric layout.
All of my B&O Radio devices are working fine. This includes both Mozart (Balance) and older (BS2 gen1). I guess I’d try rebooting the core and/or stage.
Not exactly on topic, but I just lost 2 of my favorite stations. They are still in the list, but when select them, no music. I’m guessing the station owners are closing down the “free” streams to push us to monetization.
When my motherboard failed, it failed. There was nothing intermittent about it. Then again, the last time I had a HD fail (in a laptop, not the BS5), it also was not intermittent. In my experience, intermittent problems are often bad cables or bad connections (or most commonly software). I did once have an intermittent problem with a macbook that was solved with a new cable to the HD.
Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about how to read the crashdumps or what they mean.
Oops, I guessed wrong about the Beoremote behavior. The “my buttons” on the Beoremote one are automatically linked to the “my buttons” on the BS1. If you program a button on the BS1 to “get the weather”, pressing the corresponding button on the remote will get the weather (regardless of microphone status). If you long press the Beoremote mybutton to “program” the button to the current settings (as you do on non-GVA devices), it behaves the same as long pressing the button on the BS1: it prompts for you to speak another command regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.
I don’t know what happens if you’ve never registered the device to Google as mine is registered and I’m just turning the microphone on and off. I don’t feel like re-setting up my BS1 just to test this since I don’t mind using Google – like I said, it’s helpful in the kitchen when the hands are wet or dirty (and we’re careful to only discuss our plans for illegal activities in other rooms without listening devices) 😀
9 time out of 10, it’s the mother board… unless you’ve already had this repaired. My repair guy told me the original board had some issues with heat so if you operated your BM5 is an warm environment or the ventilation wasn’t good, then it tended to fail. The only solution I’m aware of for this is to get the part replaced by B&O.
It could also be the hard drive – these fail too. It’s not hard to replace the hard drive if you have a backup of the old one. If you search the 2012 – 2022 forum archive, you can find threads about doing this. You will want to find the service tool which has been posted to the forum in the past. This gets loaded to a USB drive and you boot the BS5 from it, and then can rebuild a new disk. I guess I’d start here. If the BS5 will not boot from the service tool USB drive, then it’s probably the mother board that has failed.
Just to be clear, you can do the initial wifi setup without Google. I was just pointing out an issue that came up here recently with respect to changing the wifi network after this initial configuration. You need to go into Google to do this, but you can always setup from scratch if you need to change the wifi network and don’t want to use Google.
That’s an interesting question about Beoremote operation. My guess is that the remote “my buttons” work the same on a Google vs non-Google Beosound, especially if you never go through the Google setup. That is, you would use the app to select a B&O Radio station or other source, then program the remote mybutton… so you would get your 4 buttons without Google, but they are on the remote rather than the unit.
I do have a BeoRemote so I will test this when I get a chance.
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