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
Hello.
I mostly use Bluetooth to stream to my speakers because it’s just more convenient for me due to the way I’ve set things up on my phone, not to mention it does use a lot less battery compared to say AirPlay especially when I’m playing music the whole day at home.
These are the speakers I have:
BeoSound 2 (Gen 2 w/o GVA)
BeoSound 1 (Gen 1)
BeoPlay A1
And my Bluetooth players are an iPhone 8 and iPhone 11 Pro.
I found that even with the latest software update Bluetooth can be quite temperamental on all of my speakers. Most of the time it works, but often enough I find that occasionally one of my speakers will fail to pair until I reboot the speaker, and it’s definitely not a problem with either of my phones.
For example: sometimes when I wake up in the morning I find that I cannot pair to my BeoSound 1 with either of my phones until I reboot the speaker, but the BeoSound 2 works (and sometimes vice versa), and I’ve even had my BeoPlay A1 fail to pair a number of times even when freshly powered on until I restart it again. Occasionally I can use AirPlay (for the BeoSound 1 & 2 anyway) as a backup, but AirPlay isn’t always reliable (sometimes my phone can’t find the speakers even though they’re visible in the B&O app).
This has been a problem ever since I got my speakers about a year ago, and I always hope that a software update eventually fixes it but that never seems to be the case.
I also take extra care to always gracefully disconnect from my speakers once I’m done with them; so I’ll never just walk out of range but rather I’ll manually disconnect them from my phone. But that doesn’t seem to matter since sometimes even in the middle of playing music the Bluetooth connection crashes.
It’s also worth adding that it’s only my B&O products which exhibit such behaviour. I have both a speaker and headphones from another brand which work flawlessly with Bluetooth every time on my same phones
What I don’t understand is why B&O cannot allow the user to configure a user-specified daily reboot of the speakers if they’re going to be so unreliable; at least that’ll ensure that I’ll mostly wake up to a functional product (since I do notice that it’s usually a problem once the speakers have been on for a few days in a row without a reboot in between). This isn’t even a complicated feature to implement and it’s the least they can do if they’re never going to get around to fixing their Bluetooth stack.
No issues here with bluetooth from an iPhone X and my BS2 (GVA), A1 and P6. Not sure what to suggest but hope things improve for you.
B&O products are V1-32, BS2, H95, E8 and an Essence remote.11-46 now replaced with Sony A90J 65”, Sony HT-A9, Sony UBP-X800M2 and Sony SRS-NS7.
FWIW some of the staff at my local dealer did mention to me when I purchased my speakers that they generally don’t recommend Bluetooth because they too have admitted that B&O’s Bluetooth reliability is sketchy as best (it did take them around 15-20 minutes to get their demo BeoSound 2 GVA to pair with my phone before we gave up and used a first generation BeoSound 2 instead).
New: Beovision Harmony, Beolab 50's, Beolab 28's, Beolab 18's, Beolab 17's, Beosound Stage & LG, Beosound 2, Beoplay M3, Beoplay A1, Beoplay Portal, Beoplay H4 gen 2, Beoplay E8 3.0
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Old: Beosound 9000 mk3, Beolab 3's, Beovision Eclipse, Beolab 1's, Beolab 2, Beovision 10-46, Overture 2300, beolab 8000's, Beolab 4000's, Beovision avant 32" etc. etc.
Hello Lawrence, thank you for responding!
Yeah I originally thought that would be a problem (having more than one source paired), but I generally don’t use my iPhone 8 much and up until very recently I didn’t even pair my iPhone 8 as I wanted to keep things simple in hope that it would help; but it didn’t lol. So even with just one source (the iPhone 11 Pro) I do still experience Bluetooth dropouts (or as described originally pairing simply fails right from the get-go).
So I really don’t know what to make of this whole situation.
I’ll probably just wireshark the reboot command from the app to the speaker and setup a cron job on my RPi to auto reboot the speaker every day in the morning so that I can at least listen to music when I get out of bed; been meaning to do this but I’ve been extraordinarily lazy lately.
Also I do generally prefer to fix the actual symptom if at all possible; and Bluetooth does occasionally break in the middle of playing music.
If you're using newer products, and you experience drop-outs while playing, then I'd look more toward environmental interference with the bluetooth signal. I say this because, in my experience, BT is quite reliable with the newer products, and most of the issues revolve around pairing (especially with multiple devices as mentioned above). I haven't experience drop-outs while playing except when there's interference or I'm walking around and get out of range.
Then again, if you implement your reboot idea and the problem goes away, then it is most likely a software problem.
BeoAnna:Hello. I mostly use Bluetooth to stream to my speakers because it’s just more convenient for me due to the way I’ve set things up on my phone, not to mention it does use a lot less battery compared to say AirPlay especially when I’m playing music the whole day at home. These are the speakers I have: BeoSound 2 (Gen 2 w/o GVA) BeoSound 1 (Gen 1) BeoPlay A1 And my Bluetooth players are an iPhone 8 and iPhone 11 Pro.
I would almost suspect "bashing".
In my experience bluetooth is prone to fallouts on headphones, speakers and other peripherals. Occasionally, while listening to music on bluetooth connected headphones (sennheiser) the sound goes wonky when the keys are pressed on a bluetooth keyboard. I'd steer away from bluetooth and use wifi instead. This also makes it simple to access the speakers from multiple devices, assuming they are on the same wifi.
Out of curiosity, did you experience a difference in power consumption between wifi and bluetooth or was your statement based on theory?
Carolpa:I am confused. Just resently you started a discussion about Airplay on the same devices and the lost of sound quality. Please elaborate. I would almost suspect "bashing".
Haha, if you’re going to accuse anyone of “bashing” you’re looking at the wrong person; I’ve got a long history with B&O and while I’ve taken a breather from the brand for some years I decided to slowly jump back into the experience again after my most recent change of residence.
I’m generally a strong proponent of the brand and strongly despise how so-called “audiophiles” find it fashionable to bash B&O.
With respect to my AirPlay issues, yes they’re still issues and yes I do use AirPlay as both a fallback and when I want to use AirPlay Multiroom but Bluetooth remains my default and preferred method of streaming so it’s kinda annoying when it fails.
tlk:Out of curiosity, did you experience a difference in power consumption between wifi and bluetooth or was your statement based on theory?
Measured. It’s also quite noticeable for me since I typically only charge my phone once every two days on my iPhone 11 Pro, and I’m home a lot. I can easily listen to music for more than 12 hours a day since I consider music quite crucial to my sanity. I ran the tests back when I first got the speakers out of curiosity since Bluetooth’s design goal has always been lower power consumption.
Mikipidia:Btw with the bs2 sound issues, do you have them on both BT and AP?
For my sound issues the BS1 did eventually behave normally again after switching in between various wall positions and so on (out of nowhere my bass finally came back even though I eventually set everything back to default (not using a factory reset though)). Really weird. I tried the same thing with my BS2 but for now what I’ve done is set it to “Free” instead of “Wall” and move the bass sliders a few notches up on the equaliser.
It’s definitely much more tolerable now though.
Having said that I really wouldn’t be surprised if B&O has been adjusting the bass on the BS2 over time though.
And I say this because when I first got the speaker there really was too much bass (I used to use it on the “Corner” setting despite it not being in a corner, but after my last update (back in December I think) I noticed the bass was lowered so I settled down on the “Wall” placement).
After that update though I hadn’t gotten around to updating the speakers since my most recent update so it was quite a big jump in version numbers. Based on the information provided by other forum users I think I skipped around 4-5 new releases, so if they’ve been doing incremental changes to the sound signature then it’ll be a lot more obvious to me.
Stan: If you're using newer products, and you experience drop-outs while playing, then I'd look more toward environmental interference with the bluetooth signal. I say this because, in my experience, BT is quite reliable with the newer products, and most of the issues revolve around pairing (especially with multiple devices as mentioned above). I haven't experience drop-outs while playing except when there's interference or I'm walking around and get out of range. Then again, if you implement your reboot idea and the problem goes away, then it is most likely a software problem.
Hmm. Now that you mention it: I do recall my dealer mentioning that one of the reasons we were having pairing issues is due to the sheer number of Bluetooth devices they have in the showroom. It’s a plausible explanation I guess but I never dug into it further.
I say this though because in my current apartment things are really congested in terms of the sheer number of wireless access points everyone is running (neighbours and all), and while Bluetooth is designed to handle interference I’m not sure to what degree. I also recall USB 3.x being a culprit but I don’t have any permanently attached USB 3.x devices on any of my systems, so I doubt that’s the case.
While Bluetooth dropping out and crashing does happen, it’s doesn’t happen too often (about once a month I’d guess). My biggest issue is Bluetooth simply refusing to pair when I want to connect to the speaker.
What I’ll do for now is once I’m back home I’ll analyse the communications between the app and the speaker and just implement a reboot scheduler once I’ve picked up on the reboot command sent from the app, I still strongly suspect that there’s some sort of memory leak occurring that’s causing the Bluetooth stack to crash after the speakers have been up for some time, though it could be a combination of factors whereby interference is exasperating the problem further which results in more frequent issues.
I generally configure reboot scheduling on almost everything I own since it does prevent very obscure memory management issues from building up over time and eventually causing a degradation in performance, so we’ll see how that goes!
Thank you for this message though, it does give me something else to meaningfully look into in more detail. Cheers Stan!
BeoAnna:It’s also quite noticeable for me since I typically only charge my phone once every two days
Okay. I assumed that most people have their phone connected to their local wifi already, and so turning bluetooth on would be an additional drain on the battery.
BeoAnna:in my current apartment things are really congested in terms of the sheer number of wireless access points everyone is running (neighbours and all), and while Bluetooth is designed to handle interference I’m not sure to what degree.
Exactly. I doubt that a daily reboot will solve interference issues. 5Ghz wifi to the rescue.
BeoAnna:suspect that there’s some sort of memory leak occurring that’s causing the Bluetooth stack to crash after the speakers have been up for some time
Could be the case. I would not be surprised if B&O do not test their devices in modern city apartments surrounded by microwave ovens, loads of weird wifi access points and dozens of potentially broken bluetooth devices.
Bluetooth’s drain on the battery merely by being on with no active connection is pretty much negligible, and even with an active connection it’s as good as negligible; don’t forget Bluetooth was designed for small portable devices with microscopic batteries compared to what we get in phones. So it’s definitely not something I’d worry about. I used to have Bluetooth turned off all the time as well until I educated myself against all the FUD.
While a daily reboot won’t solve interference issues for sure, it could still help especially if there’s something funky going on in the Bluetooth stack (and again I suspect it could be exasperated by the conditions of my apartment, an environment which as you said B&O might not have accounted for).
I remember following Mikipidia’s whole Beolab 50 shenanigans, and if I remember correctly they suspected something similar?
As in the possible reason he had the weird clicks was because the speakers weren’t tested in a congested network environment and hence his issues.
As for 5GHz wireless; while yes I can turn 2.4GHz off it doesn’t change the fact that my neighbours all have their access points operating on both hands, and I actually have my speakers connected to my 2.4GHz network as they are not within reliable range of my 5GHz network due to a number of solid walls I have between the speakers and my wireless access point.
I guess I could add another WAP on the opposite side of my house to test this out though.
[Didn't Miki go wired and still had problems? Anyway,...]
You can have all neighbors with their access points operating both on 5GHz and 2.4GHz, and still the 5GHz will work better just because there are many more available channels. Also most access points, by the time they were built with 5GHz, had channel-scanning built in so they would pick a free channel unless explicitly configured not to do that. You can usually find an unused channel for a fixed-channel assignment, if your own WAP isn't smart enough to hunt every time it reboots. Not to mention with only channels 1, 6, and 11 being the only non-overlapping choices in the 2.4GHz range, morons who pick channel 9 (for example) ruin it for everybody nearby-enough on *both* 6 & 11. Plus if the neighbors are close enough, there's absolutely nothing to be done about 2.4GHz getting smothered every time a microwave oven is used. Ugh.
BUT having a free channel doesn't fix your *range* issues with 5GHz vs. 2.4GHz, alas! Putting a second wireless access point somewhere nearby is a good solution, even if you cannot hardwire it to the main router. Why? You can position that WAP wherever necessary for its own good signal reception: shelf, floor, ceiling, sideways, external antenna, tinfoil cone, whatever it takes. But then your speaker merely must be nearby the new WAP, positioned as artfully as you like.
For foolproof daily reboot, I have a one-word solution for you: Intermatic!
Haha, mercifully all of my neighbors are too blissfully unaware of networking basics to be mucking around with their wireless network channels; literally *everyone* is on channel 1 (with me being the only one on 11, and 6 is also free (and no-one is on any of the overlapping channels either)) on the 2.4GHz band. I run a comprehensive wireless network scan every six months or so whenever I vet through the configuration of my gateway and wireless access point just to make sure everything is kosher and I didn’t miss out on any firmware updates requiring my attention.
And nope, the crappy routers given out by most of our ISP’s don’t bother with channel scanning.
Anyway wireless is never an issue for me, it’s Bluetooth deciding to take a vacation whenever it feels like it on all of my B&O speakers. Not sure how much moving the speakers to a 5GHz network will help given the hundred or so 2.4GHz networks around my vicinity, but I’ll give it a shot. Again there’s two issues here: one being pairing randomly failing after several days of uptime, and another being Bluetooth crashing in the middle of playback.
Anyway I have a pretty big upgrade on my home network due once some of my new kit has arrived, so I’ll get all of that tested out eventually. My new access point will be mounted in an open area bang in the middle of my home so I’ll finally ditch 2.4GHz once that happens.
As for Miki’s Beolab 50, yeah it was all really bizarre. I think the speakers were still scanning for wireless networks even when wired, I really cannot remember the details, but I do vaguely recall a mention on how his location was pretty congested with tons of wireless networks which greatly amplified the problem and hence why the speaker from his dealer which ordinarily worked fine also began ticking when they moved it over to his home.
Anyway I’ve always joked that this is such a first-world B&O problem to assume everyone’s living in a huge mansion in the middle of nowhere haha.
For my own speakers though I kinda suspect that in addition to some memory leak in the Bluetooth stack it’s somehow being amplified in a congested network environment, which may be why B&O didn’t catch it during testing. In the interim I’ll proceed to intercept the reboot command from the app and just setup a cron job on my server to take care of that every morning.
And finally; yeah I did originally consider an electrical timer of sorts but due to the way I have things wired at the moment I’m not really in the mood to implement such a solution though I do agree it’s definitely the most fool-proof method. I’ll probably just end up writing a script to probe for the speaker first before sending the reboot command and then making sure it actually reboots. That way I can just log all the data I need to make sure everything’s happening the way I want it to be happening so that I have all the data to fine-tune the process if needed.
I’m quite confident that this will improve things since I have noticed that it usually takes a few days worth of uptime before Bluetooth decides to act all naughty and uncooperative with me.
I’ve been meaning to look into this forever but work, laziness, and a healthy dose of procrastination got in the way!~
Thank you to everyone for contributing to this thread though, it’s given me a few extra things to look out for so let’s see how this all works out.
Yeah there isn’t much in terms of Bluetooth settings in the speaker’s web interface unfortunately and I have tried fiddling around to no avail. Admittedly I do use Bluetooth *a lot* so maybe that’s why I’m more susceptible to problems; I generally average 4-6 hours of music listening a day on them and full day sessions aren’t that common since I do always like to have background music playing, and of course I switch between speakers a lot too.
I’ll see how things pan out with having the speakers freshly auto-rebooted every morning, hopefully there’s at least some improvement.