[Stan]

@severed_hand

The Marantz can’t multi-room with my Beosound in the adjoining bathroom.  It also doesn’t work just like all the other beosounds with which my wife has finally become comfortable.

I listened to TV through stereo speakers for many years.  I don’t understand the pushback.  I’m not doing critical listening.  It’s mostly background noise, but with better bass, treble and midrange than the weak built in speakers.   If stereo is so odd, why do most tvs have 2 speakers?

[Stan]

Wow, tough crowd here…

This is almost EXACTLY what I wishing for yesterday morning as I was trying to find the right audio solution for our newly remodeled bedroom.  I have a non-B&O TV and wish to improve the TV sound and listen to streaming services and a turntable.  Music is more important than TV audio (we don’t really watch movies in the bedroom, just regular TV and sometimes I get banished there to watch sports).  Integration with existing B&O equipment is a big plus along with cost (relative with B&O) since I’ve already dropped too much on the remodel.

My internal conversation:  “Why don’t TVs have variable analog audio output anymore?  I can’t be the only one thinking this… Oh look, they have cheap boxes that can capture the audio from an HDMI signal and output it as analog.  I can send that into a Core/Essense and there we go.  Ugh, another box, and I wonder how good that will sound, and what about synching audio with video?… and I will probably need 2 remotes – one for the TV, one for the volume.  Yuck!”

For these reasons, I had my finger hovering over the “buy” button on a Stage but held off because it really is overkill for my situation (the smoked oak that the wife likes is almost $3K now, the Stage is more about video audio than 2 channel stereo), and I’d really like to put those BL8000s or BL4s I have gathering dust to use (and get better stereo separation).  Let’s just get the TV (a LG C3 in case I need to integrate with Stage) and see where to go from there after using it a bit.

Late last night, I’m bored and decide to pop into BeoWorld and see if there’s anything interesting going on…  A new Core!?!  Oh my, they really hate it!  Let me take a look.  Glory, glory, it’s just what I’m looking for!!!

For those complaining about the price – it’s only $50 more than a Core, and it has pretty much everything the Core has plus HDMI (arc), Tidal, Mozart and a better way to drive BL50/90s (I assume that’s what the USB output is all about).  Only one PL output?  Buy a splitter (and help keep Sounds Heavenly in business).  Personally, I don’t see the loss of TuneIn as a negative.  If they added surround processing / center channel / wisa, they’d probably charge at least $3-4K.  Looks?  Really?!?  It’s going to be hidden in a cabinet and at least this one doesn’t look like an Ali Express special.

I still haven’t hit the buy button on this, but I most likely will.  I’m not looking forward to being an early adopter – I usually hang back and let others debug, but given Mozart and HDMI(arc) are not new to B&O technologies, I think I’ll be fine.

I can’t predict the market, but, to me, this is a winner.

[Stan]

One small correction to what I said above about GVA and line-in:  All Balances have line-in.  However, only the non-GVA version can distribute the line-in audio via NL.  An odd quirk that I misremembered.

[Stan]

^^^ What he said.

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

One more thought… you might want to also consider the BL8s.

[Stan]

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

[Stan]

On my BS9000, both A.MEM and A.AUX turn on the AUX input.  Perhaps the BS5 is the same.

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

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

[Stan]

That looks very nice.  Good job!  You’re inspiring me to do something more than digging out my phone all the time.

Stan

[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.

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

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?

 

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

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.

[Stan]

Unfortunately, I don’t know anything about how to read the crashdumps or what they mean.

[Author]

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