Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Aha, of course: Mary Fahl was the voice of “October Project”! Makes perfect sense now… If you like Renaissance, try the albums “October Project” (1993) and “Falling Farther In” (1995).
P.S. Note the similarly goofy lettering, see “Fumbling” above: “Ocfobef Projecf”. Flanders & Swann said it best: “”Greenfleeves’, that’s a funny name for a fong.”
Renaissance touring in 2014…..with Annie Haslam – and Mary Fahl
Self-indulgent, singing vocal exercises in concert… Also, Mary Fahl (in 2014) sounded like Annie Haslam *used to* 40 years prior — but that duet just showcased the loss. Referencing further above, it’s like any post-2010 Sarah McLachlan concert: a little creaky, a little shrieky. Likewise, it’s uplifting that Joni Mitchell *could* sing (and play guitar!) yesterday at the famous Newport Folk Festival, but *should* she? If one needs a nostalgia fix, or to give accolades for a lifetime of performance, one should purchase an original album, remastered, instead. (Now who’s the grumpy cat? But I’ll go listen to a (decade-old) Mary Fahl recording, as you suggest!-)
Beosound A1 2nd-gen available at verizon.com for USD 150. Black and grey only, while supplies last. That’s a decent price; wish I wanted a Bluetooth speaker:
Notes: (i) amazon.com has not-quite-so-good prices, $205 for black and $181 for grey. (ii) These resellers’ website “discount percentages” are all calculated from $250, i.e. before the most-recent 10% gratuitous price increase, as @Curly alludes to above. (iii) Verizon is just getting rid of A1 from its line-up. [EDIT: [[Those of you who remember the Verizon-custom (fewer drivers) Beosound Stage will notice it’s no longer available.]] back on Verizon’s website again, $999 as usual.] Looks like they are keeping the Explore, Level, and Beolit 20, which remain at (pre-gratuitous-increase) list prices of $199, $1499, & $529 respectively.
[Edit: sale ended August 31. They did keep the product (back at $250) on the website.]
Now thru 8/5/2022 B&O is reprising (see above) their “BESTSELLER20” website item sale 20% off Level or Balance (USA & Canada).
What app version 4.1.0 will attempt versus what the product will actually play are different: an “Action not supported by the selected product” message pops up when I try to play B&O Radio stations, but TuneIn stations play OK (even without logging in), on ASE2 Beosound 1 2nd-gen non-GVA, both old and latest firmware.
Listening to the excellent Sarah McLachlan album from 1993 tumbling towards ecstasy
And I thought only Japanese manga characters were too stylized to read! (<insert smiley here> N.B. Let it be known that I have *great* respect for @MM’s multi-lingual prowess. Although “Tumbling Towards Ecstasy” *is* nicely alliterative, it is also apparently a well-known gay “bareback” feature film.)
Obligatory-on-topic: One of my favorite live performances is watching & listening to Camille Henderson sing incredibly matched backup vocals with Sarah McLachlan in the song “Fear”. Watch the “Mirrorball” concert DVD (or maybe “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy Live”) to check them both out together.
This happened to me once, from connecting the auxiliary device to an Aux Output cable rather than an Aux Input cable. The Beocenter actually amplified the cross-talk from the wrong pins of the DIN socket, if you turned the volume up high enough! This is why I always suggest buying a Tape In/Out RCA-to-DIN cable, because even if you get it wrong, the first thing you try is switching from the red/black RCA pair to the yellow/green RCA pair! (Yes, a genuine B&O cable has little plastic “cuffs” riding the 4 connectors, labeled “IN” and “OUT”. But the colors on the aftermarket cables are pretty obvious and about 10 times cheaper!-)
[Edit: If your laptop worked — if using the same cable — then this isn’t the problem. But I bet you have separate 3.5mm->DIN and RCA->DIN cables, rather than some adapter doing RCA->3.5mm->DIN.]
B&O is discounting the H95 Nordic Ice by 30% on their website. Enter code “BEOPLAYH9530” in cart. Thru 7/31/2022. Supposedly only 1 product purchase, supposedly US/Canada only.
And what is inside? The specification of a BS A1 or more?
Oops, right you are — looks like I mis-titled… Thought it was a Level inside because of the publicity blurb saying “multi-point connectivity”. But the BeoLenciaga battery specs are 18 hours like the A1(2gen), not 16 hours like the Level. Also they left room for a purse inside, despite the exterior looking deep enough to hold the larger drivers. So it is a handbag and not a boombox.
Press kit, thanks to @Millemissen’s eye: https://press.bang-olufsen.com/d/gKpSDxqk8eyT/news#/july-2022/a-collaboration-between-balenciaga-and-bang-olufsen-introducing-a-new-concept-for-listening-the-balenciaga-i-bang-olufsen-speaker-bag-1
B&O “Story”, thanks to @Mr10Percent’s eye: https://www.bang-olufsen.com/en/gb/story/balenciaga
MM
Ahem… First! But I didn’t tread on your later post just to say so…
new product: Balenciaga X Level
Appropos of @Mr10Percent, no haute colors because this time the collaborator was doing black & white! Check out the 51st collection movie at couture.balenciaga.com. Might we actually need a black rubber sport coat & opera gloves, those of us in the pipe&slippers brigade?
BeoLenciaga
Oooh. Wish I’d thought of that…
OK, yes, I admit to watching the “51st collection” fashion runway movie at couture.balenciaga.com . Are those Mercedes face masks limited edition too? One might be able to afford an in-stock item… Of course my nice BeoLenciaga would get scratched right away if I went to the airport dressed like that, and security threw me to the ground before calling the Carabinieri!
This has been a problem in Chicago ever since B&O distribution moved to New York. But aren’t partners required to be able to send out a repair, even if they cannot fix anything themselves? So there must be someone they use, try asking it that way. For example, BeoBoston store uses Atlantic Systems in Hanover, MA. Alas, mail-away requires that you be able to extract the amplifier chassis yourself. Maybe the OH store? (Was rumored to be related to the Chicago store when that closed.) Whoever they use, at least it’s closer than MA or CA. Good luck and please post your result for others! [Edit: No, forget Cincinnati, a $500 diagnostic fee! Applies to the repairs of course, but you can bet nothing will be less than $1000 as a result of sunk-cost psychology. Sheesh, I remember when Atlantic Systems started charging $50 minimums just to keep out the riff-raff and non-repairable junk…]
Hi trackbeo, Yes, I accepted the new update manually, I had to update each Emerge separately as they were set to have auto updates turned off. All is working fine at 10017 software level, with the auto updates still disabled after this manual update. Kind regards, Steve.
Thanks, @Steve, I understand that you were not willing to go through the hassle of creating another account and adding your products to it. So I sacrificed a BeoSound 1(2.gen) to test. Result: The iOS app (4.0.3.xxxxx) updates the firmware of a product added fresh to a new account, regardless of internal settings it may have had from a previous account. The iOS app does not ask if it can update the newly addded product, it just does so. Caveat Usor.
Correct, and it will continue to work even if you use the app to delete the Level from your B&O User account! (Well, maybe not B&Oradio. But Spotify Connect, or streaming from your in-house DLNA server, or AirPlay will continue to work OK. The device has smarts internally and doesn’t go checking to see if it’s “authorized” to play. Oops, mustn’t give B&O any ideas…)
More importantly, a clean, unbroken playback stream tells you (usually) that there are no devices on your network with a duplicate IP address as your Level. (Depends on the network hardware of course, but typically a duplicate IP will see packets suddenly being mis-delivered and then coming back again.)
The other thing you learned from your experiment is that the Halo is not at fault, and probably the network hardware is not at fault. The Halo and the app are not running the same code, yet *both* fail to find the Level. Despite being different code, probably both follow a similar procedure for “discovery” of available playback devices. Unlikely that the discovery ruleset has a flaw, so we conclude that likely the Level isn’t identifying itself, “answering” the discovery broadcast packets on the network. But you can’t 100% rule out the network hardware, so the next step would be to use itself to check on its connections. This is beyond the scope of a short answer and beyond the ken of “support” but basically you use the tools provided by the router to see if its connection (typically a list of MAC addresses and their corresponding IPs) is “active” versus “offline”, which has different meaning/words among vendors, but the basic idea is that the device has requested an IP address and responds to broadcast packets, and “offline” is maintained so the device gets the same IP address even without a reservation — but the router thinks it isn’t responding right now. If you can get a window into what the router thinks about your device when the Halo and the app think it’s missing, knowing that might help.
Regarding the Halo-Level disconnect issue, this happens alot with Sonos systems too, and the standard support response sequence is:
(i) assign static IPs, (ii) look to make sure no other devices got assigned the same IPs, (iii) don’t reboot the Level, reboot the Halo, (iv) don’t reboot the Level or Halo but reboot the Wi-Fi access point, (v) create a divided network (software or hardware) to see if it still happens with *just* the Halo and the Level on their own net, (vi) hardwire the Ethernet ports on both products, then (xx) all the other Wi-FI & networking boogiemen including network exenders and meshes (Sky Q known lossage, Eero (fails) vs. Orbi (works), and a whole rabbit-hole of stuff).
If you can do (v) easily, either yourself or by borrowing some spare old networking equipment, that might cut a whole bunch of the yes/no tree from your dealings with B&O “support”. While it is theoretically possible that the Level’s wake-on-LAN design is flawed, it seems very unlikely because there would be *many* many many complaints. The Sonos gear I tend loses a zone or two once or twice a year, and even Apple Homepods disappear off the network occasionally, usually due to a catastrophic wireless interference issue — plus some edge-case recovery bugs in the products of course. But every 2 or 3 days? You can probably find and fix it yourself. Don’t give up, and maybe start a fresh thread here once you have your nope-that-wasn’t-it-either’s all in a row?
Thanks, that explains the “I have .10012, but the app *says* I got .10017, yet it offers me 10017.xxx” mistake. Great relief to know they didn’t creep in during the night and update-bandit us!-)
Alas, it does not ameliorate forcing an update on a product when it is aded to an account, rather than asking. I think they should ask for any products added — but one might argue that new products come pre-set to “updates=YES” and therefore such autobadhavior is appropriate, provided adding old “updates=NO” products leaves them untouched. (@Steve, you were going to accept your GVA speakers’ update at some point, so why not try creating a new account and add them, settings status quo? That would test if the App blindly updates them or if it accepts that “‘Off’ means ‘Off'”. I cannot afford the risk on my remaining old unit to test this.)
Sure enough: Level was left yesterday at v. 1.8.10012, with updates turned OFF. Today it shows it is at version 1.8.10017 (and updates are still turned off). But even that version has a red dot beside it, and on-offer is 1.8.10017.12375. I accepted that update, because who knows what the forced one broke such that they are offering an *even newer* version just hours later?!? After the manual update, the red dot is turned off, but it still only says v. 1.8.10017 as the current version, hiding the minor version number.
So either the current version display was intentionally lying (i.e. it was really still at 10012 but claimed 10017), or else an update was pushed to my Level overnight without my consent. Either way, it’s yet another case of… Bang & Olufsen software developers are inept and/or dishonest.
Although I switched off the automatic software updating feature, both my Levels have been given firmware V1.8.10017 now.
Nevermind that firmware might be buggy, that happens. Rather, pole up the developers’ @&$# for **forcing** any update. Forced updates definitely occur whenever you add a device using the new iOS app! I turned off updates in an older device to avoid a bug that B&O added and do not acknowledge (or “cannot reproduce” .hah.) — but now I can never delete said device from one location and re-add it to another without “accepting” the forced updatexxxxxxdowngrade. For those of you not paying attention, that means that even if you know about a buggy update version, you cannot avoid it when purchasing a new device. Even Apple managed to avoid such abject lossage with their famous HomePod firmware errors.
Not an answer, but here’s what I was planning to do:
The plug part comes in a little white cardboard box, stuffed into the perf-ed slot in the corrugated. That has a part number on it. I was planning to ask my dealer to look it up, then plus/minus-1 to see if the other countries were sequential part#s. Then is that part actually orderable, separately from the power supply as an assembly?
After that, harder would be looking for another OEM of Dee Van Enterprise Co. Ltd. DSA-45PDH. But when google didn’t come up with anything, I just decided to let it stick out of the wall farther on a crummy $6 adapter plug! Unaesthetic, but hey, the original U.K. plug is pretty clunky all by itself! Maybe I could spray the adapter Forest Brown…
Consider using the Core’s optical output to the Beolab 28’s combi-optical/analog input? (Steve @SoundsHeavenly assures us that the Core can do variable volume out over the optical. See: https://forum.beoworld.org/forums/topic/beosound-core-beolab-18-connection/ )
It’s a cheap & easy thing to try while you wait for your Powerlink cables to be delivered. A high-quality optical splitter is important (because the Core only has 1 TOSlink output & 28s do not have optical “thru” to the other speaker), but the TOSlink-to-3.5mm optical cables are cheap. (Don’t use 3.5mm optical “adapters”, get one-piece cables; too much light loss/reflection otherwise, especially with a splitter inbetween.)
It might even sound better! Certainly it will sound different. Powerlink, being analog line-level audio, is susceptible to electrical noise, as you have discovered. Plus you’re doing a D/A conversion inside the Core (to transmit the digital source or broadcast audio over analog cables) and then an A/D conversion inside the 28s (to perform the sound correction/EQ/etc.). Even given the highest quality converters, it seems pointless. [Insert equally-pointless argument here about effectively reducing audio resolution bit-depth, by doing volume control in the digital domain. Just *try* it!!!]
P.S. What’s dumber than a $5000 Audioquest “Perfect-Surface-Silver” power cord? Gold-plated connector shields on a plastic or glass optical cable…
-
AuthorPosts
