ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
B&O and this forum seem to be changing direction.
Reading the forum, the latest products seem to have more software and connectivity problems than ever, despite the fact that this was once an area where B&O excelled (well, connectivity!) This is happening just when connectivity of other run-of-the-mill products is improving all the time, and the standard TV no longer has a CRT needing a clever case to disguise it.
We seem to have dwindling vintage product restoration postings, and lots of disatisfaction with newer products that were praised only 12 months ago, and often by the same individuals.
The Wednesday forum has gone...... at one time it was like walking into a bar full of witty comedians with cutting or smart replies every 30 seconds, but in the end it was like walking into an empty bar where even the bartender had gone into the back room for a lie down due to the lack of customers.
This is not a criticism, my own postings seem fewer and of less relevance. Maybe the forum is just morphing into something more relevant to the latest products and customers. Bearing in mind that probably 99% of B&O customers never visit Beoworld, does the forum content tell us anything about B&O?
Graham
I believe we had a similar conversation (particularly about the direction of the forum) a little while back. My general view at that time (and I still think this now) is that the forum obviously changes and adapts over time but I think there is still enough great postings and information on here to keep it relevant and interesting.
Personally I am not interested in the newer B&O stuff but I always read and enjoy the vintage threads!
Ben
Beosound Stage, Beovision 8-40, Beolit 20, Beosound Explore.
Ben_S: Personally I am not interested in the newer B&O stuff but I always read and enjoy the vintage threads!
I agree. Not interested in the newer stuff either - perhaps because I can't afford it
Jacques
BeoNut since '75
I don't think the problem is exclusive to B&O - the way music, TV and movies are accessed nowadays leaves little in the way for creative interaction with it.
I need to go into a B&O store and actually use a Moment or whatever first hand, but I still get the impression my Beosystem 7000 is going to be a bit more exciting. That's not B&O's fault - what can you do with Spotify/Streaming services to make them interesting? Nothing.
I'm still lost why someone posts a 10hr video on Youtube about just unboxing a box.... maybe this is the future.
But I enjoy the forum and I have a few regular people I will always read their articles/posts and although you are probably right about the 99% hopefully the 1% who joins this Beoworld builds a deeper appreciation of the product and history.
we tend to forget there is more to design than designing.
chartz: Ben_S: Personally I am not interested in the newer B&O stuff but I always read and enjoy the vintage threads! I agree. Not interested in the newer stuff either - perhaps because I can't afford it
Same here only vintage and no money, not that I ever would use that kind of money on sound or video. and I hate it when I have to use hoers to configure software for wifi or linking items to each other. what I like is something I can plug in press a button and it works, then maybe use it with a functioning remote, Lately I bought a cheap TV flat panel, at the same time the phone company changed my router and changed to fiber optic cables. 3 TVs and 4 computers worked immediately with the new modem, but the new TV not so. I used hours on the web to find the failure, spoke 2 hours with a useless so called technician (she knew less than I of modems and wifi) from the phone company to configure the new modem. After a couple of days I called the phone company again, spoke with a technician who knew, the modem was bad, got it changed and everything worked. And that is what you get today from nearly all providers, Software failures, configuration failures, hardware failures. And that is also why I stay away from it, and stay with my 5 year old mobile flip phone.
The vintage crowd has been nearly sleeping lately, but most of them are still there, only reading though. but when an interesting thread comes up, they are there, Sonavor kept the vintage section going by himself for a while, followed by Chartz, but now we are into summertime with vacations and that always give less traffic. Comes to it that prices for vintage are way up because of the growing interest in vinyl, and with that young people has discovered that items you plug in, press a button and by magic it works actually exists, they are used to messages like "close all doors and windows and try again" and that drives up the prices.
Collecting Vintage B&O is not a hobby, its a lifestyle.
Killyp: I don't think the problem is exclusive to B&O - the way music, TV and movies are accessed nowadays leaves little in the way for creative interaction with it.
That's an excellent point. I think it's hard to keep the kind of gloriously beautiful and interactive things B&O have always been noted for in this age, but also to an extent I think that's also something that should be addressed in design. The moving stands and speakers on the new Avant are a step in the right direction in my opinion, but all in all I think B&Os design is suffering in the post Jensen/Lewis era. I still use my BS9000 as the hub of my system as it's perhaps one of the icons of that kind of impressive design, and will keep it there as long as I can make it still function, even though a Playmaker is attached and what I use most of the time to stream music to the system. Seems a really clever design team could still manage to add some more pizazz to things but outside the Avant not sure I've seen it.
The forum will change, it will change shape as much as an amoeba over time. Lately I read the new product threads, often while shaking my head at the problems, and still truly enjoy the vintage restoration threads. Now if only Martin could help supply restoration parts for me that'd be something! A new shoulder would be perfect thank you!
Jeff
I'm afraid I'm recovering from the BeoVirus.
My thoughts too! So massively out of my price range as a 23 year old student!
I think any forum which is ties to a product or brand will follow the fortunes of that product or brand... It's as simple as that.
Personally, I think Vintage Audio will become very 'niche' and prices will rocket in the near future. People will want to 'touch' and 'feel' audio once more. High end, wonderfully designed pieces like B&O will attract a lot of attention, and a premium...
Watch and see!
Lee
9 LEE: I think any forum which is ties to a product or brand will follow the fortunes of that product or brand... It's as simple as that. Personally, I think Vintage Audio will become very 'niche' and prices will rocket in the near future. People will want to 'touch' and 'feel' audio once more. High end, wonderfully designed pieces like B&O will attract a lot of attention, and a premium... Watch and see! Lee
I think you are probably right, at least for a subset of the market, perhaps the same subset of younger buyers who are suddenly rediscovering vinyl.
Of course the forum is changing - B&O is changing!
The way (many) people use their products/listen to music and watch video has changed....
...and so must a company, that wants to serve people with quality A/V product.
Still we are individual people, people with our own prefrences, our own stories in life.
I find that the Beoworld forum has room for everyone, who is impressed by or even 'infected' by, what B&O is - those who are into the new stuff,
those who swears on the pre-NL/the David Lewis era products or those, who find, that the vintage part/period of B&O is the most important.....
Sometimes I see more threads/more activity on one part, sometimes on the other.
Nothing wrong with that.
The only thing, that might be a threat to the future of this forum, is that the members/users (for one or another reason) might give up to write about,
what they love about B&O, about their passion for B&O - that they might stop sharing their thoughts and knowledge (and questions).
It is up to us to keep this forum alive and kicking!
MM
There is a tv - and there is a BV
I can understand that some members won't visit the forum when they're insulted by others. Happened to me by a french members who proposed to sell me a MLGW for a good price. In the meantime I already bougth a MLGW from another member but I wanted to buy two MLGW - what he didn't know.After he saw that I bought a MLGW he startet to insult me and other members of this forum by calling us "uneducated people" etc. Yes, it's not a person I would by my second MLGW from and I was upset because of this behaviour!But it didn't stop me from visiting this forum. I think we NEED this forum as documentation from B&O is simply lousy! There are always neat tricks you find in this forum that aren't mentioned in the FAQ at B&O nor in their usermanuals and I love that!The way B&O changes is problematic: As a premium brand you need to have premium world class customer service, premium products (manufacturing quality and timeless design) and all this are points that B&O does NOT have at present!Ok, you could argue about design: Where someone says "AWESOME!" the next person disagrees and simply says "Bah!" But the post Jensen/Lewis era is a hard time for B&O and it's time - just my personal view - that they find a way for their products to stand out from the crowd!The so called vintage look / design is just a fad and every company does it. They need a design line again where you can clearly say "This MUST be a B&O product!" A product the company AND the customers can be proud of again combined with AMAZING world class customers service. Especially the last part is a point that nobody in Denmark seems to care about. Every fool can sell you any product!Due to automated manufacturing there aren't too many differences in quality (I have Sony products which quality is FAR better than B&O) but the service area and customer support is the area where you can really shine and let people talk positive about your company.Buying an 8.000 Euro Avant TV with gear problems of the motorized stand or speakers and software problems make people talk, too. But not in a good way and some people simply laugh about you how you could be so dumb to pay too much money for a product that isn't any better than a LG, Philips, Sony... TV. And you know they're right! Instead the 65" 4K LG TV from my Brother in Law only costs 50% of the Avant and guess what: It simply works and it works great. It has motorized speaker bar, too.That's something Bang & Olufsen has to adress! Manufacturing in Czech and China is NOT the way to go and if all those quality problems don't stop, there's only one way to go for B&O: DOWN! The spirit of B&O is gone. B&O must stop to think and act arrogant as their products are not the best and the quality is not premium. You have to look what other companies deliver to the market and if they are great: Just buy some products from the competition, disassemble them and see why they are better than yours and learn from them! It's not a shame to learn s.th. new! That's what the car manufacturers are doing, too.And did they EVER heard something about this mystery called "marketing"? They still seem to think that they don't need it. No wonder the company is struggling. So many things are going wrong and the CEO doesn't seem to do anything against it.I can understand that vintage products are getting more interest as the "modern way" of interacting with music consists of two things- lousy quality (iPhone earbuds, MP3, AAC...)- no physical interaction, just touchscreens.There's another factor that need to be considered: Especially younger people seem to get dumber and stop thinking. They just use their smartphones as a brain...There's no other explanation or why else would you listen to MP3 with 192kbit/s on those horribly sounding beats headphones and call that "great sound"? Maybe they never experienced really great sound but they don't want to search or try alternatives. "Oh, that's not from Apple? Than I'm not interested!" (This is a real life experience). When I pick up some vintage or older gear (maybe 10-15 years old) I'm sometimes simply fascinated of them because of the following- build quality (nearly nothing where you can read "Made in China")- reliability!- intelligent design: You can experience that the company and the engineers thought about what they're doing and how it was the best and easiest way to achieve that.- materials (aluminium front and not a that cheapo shiny plastic)Nowadays products:- lousy materials- lousy software ("Oh, we can watch that movie in 10min after I'm finished with restarting/resetting!")- lousy building quality- short lifetimeThere are only 6 great products at present:- Beolab 18- Beovision 11 (it's such a beauty!)- Beovsion Avant- Beosound Essence remote control- Beolab 12 (superb if you don't want to have big speakers on the wall)- Beoplay H6We need iconic products again! Even if people don't know the brand "Bang & Olufsen" they always now when they see a Beosound 3000 or 9000: "WOW, that's s.th. special and nice!"I like B&O and I like many of their products and I like them so much, that I brought some of them to let them be laser engraved (which looks stunning by the way)! :-)
We can't get Lewis or Jensen back, but there must exist minimum one designer in this world that is capable of bringing the timeless part of scandinavian design back home to B&O!I agree with Millemissen: It's up to us to keep this forum alive and I want to contribute to it and learn from it, too! We can learm from each other, help each other and have fun when somebody recreates e.g. a Beosound 3 into a modern Bluetooth speaker.
Thank you Beoworld and Beoworld members! I'm happy for your support since the years I'm here on this forum!T.W.G
Chris Townsend: I'm looking forward to the new mega speaker being released.
I don't think BL5 owners have anything to worry about with whatever "mega" speaker B&O poops on the market given most of their recent equipment and the Czech and China manufacturing TWG mentioned above. Hell, they've even managed to shift BL5 production over to Czech factories now and that was at one time a crowning achievement for B&O. Lately playing with all my B&O gear and having BL5s in the house again, I think my hearing is going because I don't think the BL5 has the distinct advantage over my Penta 3s that I used to think they did. Anyway, this mega speaker has been being discussed for *years* and nothing. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
And TWG I respect you for bringing up your view on the TVs. I love the overall look of the B&O TVs, but even I who can be bamboozled into owning or admiring megabuck watches, cars and other such luxuries, can not fathom why I would pay 10,000.00 or whatever the new Avant costs in the 55 inch size when I can buy a Sony XBR65X950B for 3-4000 if I look REALLY hard. And there simply is *no* picture on the market better than that Sony right now. Even then I still feel ridiculous paying that much for something as fleeting and rapidly outdated as a television set. The beauty of older B&O products can most easily be summarized in their timelessness and ability to incite imagination and whimsy. The first time I walked into an electronics store when I was little and saw the BeoLink 7000 rise in my hands as I held it, I knew B&O was something special. Years later I was at the Galleria Mall in Houston and a gentleman at the B&O store there demoed the BL5 for me for the very first time with the Pink Floyd track "Time"... I was blown away by their look and the intense amazing way the bass lines shook the floor in the mall.
Audio equipment in general has staying power and timelessness that video simply can not match. I *cherish* my Beocenter 9500 and Penta 3s. And this is coming from someone whose had literally everything under the sun, including a TRUE HiFi setup with McIntosh MC601 Monoblock amplifiers, a McIntosh MT10 turntable and Bowers and Wilkins 802 Diamond speakers at one point. It's not just about what things cost. It's about the way they're made and the quality of the product. But in a world of connected and networked this and that, and music that comes from online sources, there is only so much you can do.
@ T.W.G: Great post, I couldent agree more !!
Thomas
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Well I am a forum member for one year or so, and you can say probably I am more of a „new style of B&O customer“. What I mean by that is, I almost exclusively listen my music from Deezer/Tidal, and watch movies on Netflix/iTunes. I do recognize this is not the ultimate in audio/video quality but is good enough for me and is compatible with my lifestyle and how many hours weekly I can realistically afford to dedicate for „AV pleasures“. Mostly, I listen to some background music later in the afternoon or during weekends and watch movies/TV shows. Also, I don't have a dedicated AV room living in a small/midsize apartment.
What I wanted to say, is that I have noticed many of the old-times forum users and B&O owners are actually living in houses, have masterlinked a lot of B&O stuff and frequently collect music on physical media (CDs, records or both) or local files on NAS. And even if I will never have a setup like that, I always enjoy reading through these threads to see what cool things you can (still) do with B&O products. In a sense, I use it to build my own expectations on B&O what NL and new multiroom should provide. I also like very much a sense of community here, and seeing how people who got stuck get answers and possible solutions to their problems from others. <3
If I reflect a bit on B&O and what TWG already commented, my budget for AV is not extreme. I suspect this is true for many of the current B&O targeted audience, plus having in mind overall economic downturn across the globe. Investing 8K EUR into a TV set for this demographic is not impossible - but also not easy. Now if I'd like to do that, I need to make sure that a given product:
- is going to be long-living
- is spectacular in performance of its core task
- is technologically future-proof
And here is where I do have some issues with the Avant and with Moment too. I still feel very much determined to buy them once they are going to be „spectacular“, not only „very, very good“ products. Disclaimer: I can imagine other people's judgements differ, but I do agree with TWGs comparison between Avant and Sony65“. I own one hiend Sony TV set and I can tell you it is fantastic for a small fraction of price.
So as a conclusion: I do believe in B&O and I love their design. All my friends are crazy about my A9 too. And as much as I am not buying anything at this point, I am saving money for some B&O magic. :) In the meantime I am really glad to be part of this Forum. ;)
Great thread with some amazing posts, thank you all for very interesting reading.
I think B&O is going through some growing pains as they lay the foundation for what AnalogPlanet mentioned in his post:
AnalogPlanet: ... make sure that a given product: - is going to be long-living - is spectacular in performance of its core task - is technologically future-proof
... make sure that a given product:
These "growing pains" are what we are noticing with products teething. Something many of us didn't notice (or didn't have to) due to the relative "simplicity" of the "classic" products. Just imagine a new potential B&O customer visiting a dealer later this year or the next, and the products which will be shown and demonstrated: Everything is updated and has software which enables each product to interact with each other, with the user's mobile device, multiroom, etc -- all without wires. This is an impressive ecosystem.
Yes, more work has to be done, but I think we can all see where B&O is going. As long as the CEO can keep the company going, the results are going to be worth the wait.
Sal:Great thread with some amazing posts, thank you all for very interesting reading. I think B&O is going through some growing pains as they lay the foundation for what AnalogPlanet mentioned in his post: These "growing pains" are what we are noticing with products teething. Something many of us didn't notice (or didn't have to) due to the relative "simplicity" of the "classic" products. Just imagine a new potential B&O customer visiting a dealer later this year or the next, and the products which will be shown and demonstrated: Everything is updated and has software which enables each product to interact with each other, with the user's mobile device, multiroom, etc -- all without wires. This is an impressive ecosystem. Yes, more work has to be done, but I think we can all see where B&O is going. As long as the CEO can keep the company going, the results are going to be worth the wait.
We have threads on the changing forum from time to time - and yes it has changed a lot. It started as a a problem page really - I attempted to make sure that any query was answered within 24 hours or at the very least acknowledged. Of course it was much easier then as the products were simpler (and I owned almost all of them so could try things out!)
These days, so much is software and the technology moves quickly and B&O struggle to keep up, let alone lead. However they can still produce wonderful products - the speaker range is great - in no small part due to Geoff Martin - and the Moment has true greatness waiting to be released. I am stuck in the 60s to 90s myself so appear less than I used to mainly because so many of you now know so much more than I ever did! We do try to keep the place friendly - this site must be one of the least moderated on the internet - and the support of Lee and Lifestyle AV means that its future is relatively secure.
Long live Beoworld!
Peter