the reputation of B&O amps like the 5000,5500,6500 and 7000?

Hi folks,

I'm looking for some further informations from Beomaster users about the amplifiers of B&O.

What do you think about the 5000 and the 5500, 6500 and 7000?

What kind of speakers do you use?

Are they powerful enough for your needs?

What I never understood is the following:

If I use the old kenwood receiver (40watt) of my dad the volume is pretty loud at small increments.

When I use the beomaster 5000 i usually turn up the volume at 40. that's more than 3/4 of its power just to have a normal level?

Are the beomasters weak? Or is it just the way, they have a different scale?

 

2. Have you ever compared the Beomaster with different brands?

I have made some tests with the Braun Atelier (b&O biggest rival in those days, it was the duell between Jacob Jensen and Dieter Rams, the most famous designers in those days).

The A2 is very powerful, B&O seems to be more reliable. But the Braun is a Rail-switching-amplifier.

 

When people talk about electrics, I'm a complete rookie.

But I'm very interested and would like to know how professionals rate the Beomaster 5000, 5500, 6500 and 7000.

Are there any good reviews available?

I really appreciate your opions and thoughts.

Thank you very much

Chris

1. B&O did that on purpose.
Generally it comes convenient to have better graduation in the lower sound level range than in the higher.
You don't need to have 40 levels of high volume, 8-10 steps will easily do,
whereas most people will find it pleasing to have more to choose from in "daily livingroom" use.

I once had a nice and quite luxurious car stereo with a silly volume dial. It had 16 steps or so.
At step 4 it was already quite loud, step 3 was a bit lower but still high, step 2 nearly inaudible, step 1 almost quiet.
It was difficult to find a suitable volume setting for normal listening, I kept switching between steps 2 and 3.
Never cared about anything above step 5, - probably didn't have huge increments up to step 16 anyways - and I often
thought about redesigning the thing.
It was fairly expensive and not more than a year or two old, but I ended up selling it with the car.

The volume control in Beomaster 1900 was changed during production from 16 steps to 128 steps for the same reason.

Martin

I have both a BM5000 and BM6500 and they both are plenty powerful. I’ve used them to drive Vandersteen 2Ci speakers plus three link rooms.

They sound great; and I’ve compared them to vintage Pioneer, Marantz, and Yamaha receivers.

I have couple of 7000's and from memory they were good enough to drive b&w 802's that I owned a while ago.

now I am using them only with active speakers, so the power does not really matter.

As the previous poster explained, the volume curve has more steps in the lower 1/3 on purpose.

 

Bart

I don't know if this helps you at all but i had noticed that on my Beomaster 5500 that i had to turn up the volume to the high 30's in order to listen to the Aux source at a normal level.

It turned out that i had connected my airport express to the Tape 2 RCA Output by accident instead of the Aux input. when i switched the cables around it resolved the issue. It is quite easy to get them mixed up as the diagram with the input and output labels is upside down when viewing from the front of the receiver. I didn't realise for months as the sound was still working it was just half the volume it should have been.

I am currently using Beovox Penta speakers and the volume at 20 on the scale is already pretty loud to me.

A lot of old Japanese receivers and amps had the volume control set to that you were at full volume by about halfway up or even less. This made them pretty useless, the B&O approach of having more steps at lower levels is more useful, but there was a method in the Japanese madness. The way a lot of inexperienced people view this is, if they're playing two different receivers in a store, and one is loud at say 40 percent of total knob rotation and the other is lower in volume, they (usually helped by the salesdroid) will think, wow, this receiver has so much more power! I've seen sales droids pushing brand X say, see, how much more power it has!?! It's only turned up halfway and it's louder than the other one 3/4 of the way up!

Back in the 70s Ford did something similar in their cars, that is in the first quarter or so of the gas pedals travel it was at almost full throttle, why, the car has tons of power! You barely touch the gas pedal and whoosh, you're off! Push it the other 3/4 of the way and it barely got faster. But in that test drive it sure seemed powerful.

I have another question.

In an articel about the Beomaster 8000 I read, that this device has some kind of an auto loudness:

https://www.tonmeister.ca/wordpress/2017/10/10/bo-tech-auto-loudness/

(..)Beomaster 8000, the amount of boost applied by the loudness filter was, indeed, varied with volume.

 

was this feature exclusive for the beomaster 8000? Does the Beomaster 5000 - 7000 have this loudness filter, too?

 

Thanks for your help,

Chris

Most of the Beomaster receivers have a loudness control - although I never use them. The nature of these are they are used at low volumes to compensate for the way we hear and as the volume increases, the effect of the loudness filter tails off. The Beolab 5000 of 1967 certainly did this as shown by frequency charts in the service manual. Other manuals re not as good but I thought this was a characteristic of most loudness circuits - I could be wrong!

Another Question:

Is the circuit of the beomaster 4400 and the 5000 identical / similar?

 

Thanks a lot in advance.

 

Regards

Chris