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
As a long time user of the A3, here is my longer term review.
The A3 has outstanding sound for its size and turns your iPad into a TV
As we all know it is unstable unless it is placed on a perfectly flat surface.
The long-term negatives:
The black rubber gasket gradually expands with time and it progressively becomes more and more difficult to put the iPad back into the A3 after removal. Possibly associated with this gasket expansion, getting the 30pin slider to connect also requires more and more force/ retries.
If you leave the gasket in position on the iPad, you will eventually get a shock when you remove it because it deposits a sticky rubbery residue onto the back of the iPad. The only way I could get this deposit off was by using a metal polish cream. So B&O should really have researched the composition of these gaskets more carefully for expansion and degradation problems.
The power supply, or should I say the power supply jack plug. As supplied this is a 10mm/3.5mm right-angle plug. The huge draw back that this has is that if and when somebody trips over the powercord, or the A3 is pulled to the limit of the cord length, it puts a strain on the internal power socket of the A3 ( which I suspect is just a miniature socket soldered onto the PC board) and also puts a strain onto the bent power cable. The end result is that the socket in the A3 starts to become loose, and the wires in the power cable eventually break where they enter the plug. If B&O had specified a simple straight plug then these issues would have been avoided as the plug would just have pulled straight out if the wire was pulled or strained in any way.
My A3 was giving great service until I realised it had stopped charging unless I physically held the power cable where it enters the power jack plug. I am awaiting the arrival of a straight plug to do a repair.
Graham
Interesting and informative, thanks for posting! I haven't had my A3 long enough to see any of these problems but appreciate knowing about them in advance. I have an old iPad in mine, and use an iPad Air 2 for a real tablet. In fact the only apps I have loaded on the iPad in the A3 are Remote for my iTunes on the PC, Spotify, and Netflix. I was listening to it the other day and was struck by, for its size, how much better it sounded than any boombox I had ever heard over the years, even larger ones.
Jeff
I'm afraid I'm recovering from the BeoVirus.
The new 10mm x3.5mm power plug arrived but it wouldn't engage properly with the socket on the A3. On very close examination it appeared that the new plug was about 1mm shorter than the original, and perhaps crucially the original plug had a tiny groove around its end that I assume engages with something inside the A3.
All is not lost because I have since found that the power supply for our BS3 radio also matches the A3, although the plug has a missing groove and will pull out quite easily. The take-away from this for anyone with an A3 is to realise that the plug and socket arrangement is very fragile. If leaving it plugged in for a period consider taping it to the A3 to prevent accidental damage to both the socket and plug. It's a shame that such a detail should let down such a good product (even more so for any early adopters who paid full price!)
Lesson : don't make peripherals that rely on Apple product!
Ban boring signatures!
Puncher: Lesson : don't make peripherals that rely on Apple product!
Yes, but it's not the Apple bit that is the cause of any of the problems!
I hope that the new A1 that everyone is raving about has more robust connections.