B&O and pets

I wondered how many of you own pets that freely roam your home. It can be a challenge to have nice stuff when having pets. We got a miniature dachshund in Feb and he's a real charmer. Luckily, the speakers are wall mounted and the Beogram is out of his reach. He has tried to chew a few LPs, I managed to hear the plastic cover rustling and stop him before he got through to the record cover. Sadly, a pair of Toms wasn't so lucky. Today, cleaning the bathroom, I opened the door and stepped out and wondered where the bathmat had gone...he'd snuck it away into the living room. Basically, anything that happens, is down to the owner's negligence, my fault for leaving the record cabinet open, or my shoes around. 

 

Anyone ever lost any B&O stuff to claws or teeth?

 

 

I used to have a pair of Beovox Ms150's with the original speakers wires which my Border Collie decided to chew to a million pieces. Other than that I haven't had any other problems with B&O and pets.....I'd like to keep it like that! Personally I think humans probably cause more damage then pets! I am always complaining to people when they touch my B&O, like put the remote down gently for heavens sake!! It might get a scratch!! The worst is when people put a drink next to a B&O or put a drink on top of my beosystem 6500......just boggles my mind! How is that acceptable!

 

I don't have any pets. I think I'm probably a rarity in that regard. Not sure if it is selfishness or mainly I think it's because I'm not always home so I would make a very bad parent.

I have a 2.3 m2 mirror in my lounge room bordered in beautiful grass cloth.

I was thinking about a cat and a dog once and my friend goes "well you can kiss your mirror goodbye". Haha. So now we use that saying often.

etype76:

We got a miniature dachshund in Feb and he's a real charmer.

Here in Germany we have a saying about the dachshund: "You can't give him commands, only suggestions!"
They have quite a personality.

Luckily I've just lost some cables that where tested by our dog years ago if they are capable of being a little snack

Well I have a little boy just under two, which for the sake of this conversation is about the same as having a pet in terms of potential property damage :)

This is actually a moderately serious thing though. I have a BV7 which I'm keeping, largely because the large sound bar is metal and the whole unit is built like a tank. I can also brush the whole thing down with some wet wipes if he gets his sticky hands on it, which he does.  I was looking to upgrade a few months ago, likely to a BV11, but the frets are cloth only which would probably last (at best) a month before he poked something through them or tore them somehow.

I do think that now that B&O are going for alternative speaker covers like those gorgeous wooden ones, there's maybe a market to offer a metal grille - I'm guessing it's a snap on thing with a bracket hooking whatever grille you use, it would be fairly easy to implement for people with toddlers or pets.

I'm guessing someone will ask "why don't you get a wall mounted tv instead?" Except I can't because I'm renting our current apartment and I'm not allowed to bold a huge TV mount to the wall.

We have two cats, and a water pistol was successfully used to train them from an early age to keep their claws away from my speaker grilles!

That said, one of them does like sitting on top of my loudspeakers in the lounge when the sun is shining - I said to my wife recently "she'll have to learn not to do that when we have Beolab 90s!". In response, she gave me that withering look that women do so well...

Many years ago I had a cat that was intrigued by the workings of my Beogram 4000. She had a tendency to sit on the lid until being removed forcibly. Not only dance proof but cat proof!

At the time I had a pair of Quad ESL57s which the cat was thoroughly confused by. She leapt at one of them and got her claws stuck in the metal cover of the the membranes. She left them well alone after that!

Cleve

My dog loves listening to b&o whilst i am out and settling down to the BV8 for a film. She never touches anything though

Cleviebaby:

Many years ago I had a cat that was intrigued by the workings of my Beogram 4000. She had a tendency to sit on the lid until being removed forcibly. Not only dance proof but cat proof!

 

 

At the time I had a pair of Quad ESL57s which the cat was thoroughly confused by. She leapt at one of them and got her claws stuck in the metal cover of the the membranes. She left them well alone after that!

 

 

Cleve

That's funny Cleve! If she'd have gotten to the membranes and grids when they were energized that would have put her off doing it again too, ESLs can deliver a fairly painful shock if you do that. I remember getting bit by the big Koss electrostats we used to sell while having the back covers off to adjust the bass response which you did by moving the wires to the transformer to select different output voltages. Not fatal, but enough voltage that it was a really good static jolt. Worse than walking across a carpet and touching a door knob in winter by a fair amount. Got the attention of my coworkers...SNAP...followed by a string of curse words.

well, my ten years old buddy Ludwig, an hovawart, just destroyed one powerlink cable when he was a baby (plus one shoe, some scratches at the wall near the entrance and two legs of a chair). i´m glad, that the rest of the nonsense he did (and still does) is with us and other dogs and pets . And our cat Barney, on the other hand, is afraid of the Avant. It´s another kind of funny home cinema, when he is so much more in a hurry to pass the beovision than the dog.

My cat still chews on power cords even tho I forced him to watch this video.  

I have had pets around my B&O for years, and maybe i'm just lucky, but apart from dusting and wiping off some fur here and there, I have had zero issues. Attached are some pictures.

Unfortunately, though, they all have passed on. The orange and gray ones (their names were Duck & Owl, respectively) were brothers I had from when they were kittens, they passed a few years ago. The white and black cat, we adopted as an adult about 8 years ago (her name was VC -- long story) had to be put down just a couple of months ago . We are currently without pets. The house feels very empty.

This thread gave me a chance to look through old pictures, remember them fondly, and our life in my old small apartment, too. Good times

(Beovision Avant, Beogram 6500 TT, Beosound 9000, Duck, Beolab 2, Beolab 6000, Beocabinet 2164, Beo4 on the table)

(Beolab 2, Beovision Avant, Owl, wondering why I had rearranged some of his living room things, Beolab 3)

(VC, wondering why I'm taking her picture, Beolab 9, Beovision 11, my ugly feet )

VC wondering what new toy I've purchased for her

Just on a related note.

10 weeks ago our new Labrador destroyed my Bose ANR aviation headset. I ordered a new headset from David Clark USA(they make spacesuits too!) and started using it.

On long journeys you can connect it to your mobile phone via Bluetooth and play music to it. If ATC or the first officer talks a miniature built in DJ turns down the music so you can hear them clearly. Once they pipe down, hey presto....Abba again.

I got back very late 8 weeks ago and left the house in my mother in laws hands I got up after my customary 4 hours of sleep, and went downstairs to make a tea. Opening the kitchen door, I'm met with a disaster zone of wires, cables and bits of earphones. Not believing that the dog could destroy 2 £800 headphones in 2 weeks, I chased her around the kitchen in a furioussss anger.

With my destroyed headset in my left hand I promptly skidded and fell in a puddle of her cold pee, breaking my scafoid bone in my right hand. As I'm sat there in my underpants in a puddle of pee, my left hand clutching the destroyed headset, my right thumb sticking the wrong way, my new female neighbour( dry hot) came to see what all the noise and commotion was[:\'(]

Anyway I phoned David Clark in the US to see what can be done, and they laughed just about as much as you probably did. And they promised to tell the entire factory the whole story.

They also promised to pick up the headset and return it to the US by courier at their expense, repair it fully, and then send it back to me. And they did

http://www.flytheone.com/dc-one-x

I've been fairly lucky so far in the tech stuff. My dachshund's more into socks, pants and shoes. He did nibble a lamp cable and let out a yelp a few months ago and hasn't touched a cable since. It was plugged in but not switched on, I guess he didn't like the sensation of soft chewy plastic giving way to a screeching metal core. 

 

My family had a cat for 20 years and we never had any issues with her except wallpaper. It's great to look at the few photos I took of her sleeping on top of this and that. Those cats look very content around B&O! 

 

Chris: Your earphone story was tragically funny, the pee is just the icing. It seems to me that when I'm at my most annoyed, the dog is saying "Sheesh, he miffed about something, should I warn him about the pee just behind his foot?...nah".

 

Where's Harper?

 

 

Nice tale Chris. I enjoyed that. And like all good stories it has a happy ending.

Apart from the scaphoid! Not a good bone to break! Hope it is mending ok.

Well it's been a month or so since I posted on this but I came back today to find that my little boy (2yo next month) had decided that my BV7 was a nice canvas for his yellow crayon.  As I said though, this was a quick repair, a paper towel for the screen and a nailbrush to get the wax out of the speaker fret.

 

Pets?

you want to see the beo4 for our TV. The children don't really treat it wth the respect it deserves! Well, it's a bit chipped , anyway.

I do think that after all this, perhaps my conclusions are that

1) There are plenty B&O owners who own pets and/or small children

2) The current range (when not wall mounted, which is not an option when renting) is susceptible to very expensive damage whereas many items in the past were repairable if not impregnable

I especially do wish they got round to offering a floor mounted television that was toddlerproof. The new one with the wooden speaker thing is lovely, if you could get that in, for instance, adonised metal with a hint of colour I'd likely buy one on the day of release.

Toddler proof was a design point for the BV8 but I am not going to risk it

My 1.5 yo granddaughter has patted the diaphragm of the bl19 a couple of times while I have bit my tongue and ground my teeth

I work on the assumption that if you call attention to something it becomes a child magnet for months if not years

The ability to wall-mount the equipment has always been a good way that B&O items are protected. My children are 10 and 14 and that's a lot younger than our Century which they've hardly ever touched. In fact, when the thing was new we had guests at a party trying to open the glass door manually. It survived. 

The M5 and its resemblance to a cats scratching post reminded me of this thread. 

Simonbeo:

The M5 and its resemblance to a cats scratching post reminded me of this thread.

New kitten morphing into a cat is proving to be a menace !

Especially when she abseiled down the BeoVision 8.

I rewarded her; and placed an order for the Eclipse (just joking)

Tiny speaker or large cat? This is Pippa, a new addition to our family. Her big sister Fiona did not wish to have her photo taken.

Both Pippa and Fiona don't really pay attention to the B&O around the house. Thank goodness.

 

Lovely shot of Pippa

Here is the miscreant

(( you will have to imagine it ))