As I am a new member I apologise if this has been done before. So someone stop me if it has. About three weeks ago I fell in love with the Beosound 5. I had to have it...so I did. This is were the trouble started.
The day arrived for its installation and i waited like an expectant father or a kid on Christmas Eve. The little black van arrived and a number of boxes were unpack onto my living room floor. Slowly the floor stand was assembled and the sound and master boxes unpacked. Then came the moment to attach the beosound head to the stand. (Bang and Olufsen...what were you thinking about with this rediculous system of cables and connections?) Three seperate connections have to be made and then the cables have to be threaded through a seemingly spurious set of cable guides before they can exit the head assembly. One cable even has to be threaded under another as detailed in the instruction book. So picture the scene. My man from B and O now has £2500 of head unit in his hands. he is trying to keep 3 cables in place in their respective cable guides whilst trying with his other three hands to get the whole thing to mount onto the top of the £300 floor stand. And trying desperatelynot to drop anything. Will it have it? Will it hell as like.
There has to be a better system for the cable attachment than this. Come on B and O. This is state of the art stuff here. I have shed loads of controls on my car steering wheel and it turns through 360 degrees and it is less complicated than this.
20 minutes of twist turn on off nothing. We both looked at the Ikea style assembly instructions and did the usual..turned them upside down back to front but to no avail. Still could not make head nor tail of why it would not fit. then one of those inspirational moments...THERE WAS A PIECE MISSING. And as the black van dissappeared over the horizon I was left with a part assembled stand and everything else back in its boxes on my floor.
Day 2. The man in black returns with missing part and the assembly process begins again. It soon becomes apparent that the head will not fit on the stand with the cables threaded through their respective guides. It just does no seem possible. So with him holding the head with the leads connected but not threaded and me gently pulling them back through the stand we finally get it all connected. So installation. Now, a set up disc comes in the box and this was run on my laptop. It is version 1.0, we then find that the current version is 5.1.2 I think, so a quick link to the BO website to download that and off we go. Followed the registration process as described.
We followed the music transfer instructions to the letter. Would it work? Would it hell. The music file all 50gb of it was highlighted, the B and O software on the laptop recognised the beomaster as an external drive but it would not transfer the music. I had spent hours and hours making sure that all the files were transferable, no DRM all transferred from CD in lossless format all the album covers in place and double checked all 4800 tracks to make sure that the info was correct and it won't BL**DY work. Much head scratching from the man in black followed by telephone calls. All to no avail. the black van vanished once again but at least I had a dead screen on a stand (A very expensive stand at that), a black box full of gubins and enough cable to go to the moon and back connecting it all. But nothing that I couldlisten too. I turned my attention to the boxes that it all came in.
The box for the stand is about the same size as my 9000 so I thought that if i painted it and stuck it on the wall and stuck some CD's to it, it may pass off as a hi fi, as it was probably of more use to me than the £4800 worth of boxes that I had. Prior to the system being delivered my dealer had kindly loaded some music onto the beosound so although we could not load anything else, There was something that i could listen to and i could spend some time getting to grips with the controls, or so i thought.
Well this was a Saturday night and the system was used all night until well into the early hours of Sunday morning. Was I please?,Not half and I went to bed a very happy bunny although a bit agrieved that we could not load all my music. next morning was like Christmas..............
I could'nt wait to get down stairs and play with it the next day. I raced down stairs like a kid with a new toy..SOME TOY.. I spun the wheel on the master unit that should bring the system leaping into life.....NOTHING, NOT A JOT. When I turned the volume wheel the lovely Blue arc lite up to show that the system was on full volume but nothing was coming out.(Thank God because full volume would have made a serious mess of the plasterwork in my neighbours house). The screen was dead, no album covers shown nothing. No standby light it was a late parrot,it hand run down the curtain and joined the choir invis...sorry that is the wrong sketch although it does sound somewhat similar.
So..I did what most of us would do>>> turned it off at the mains to force a soft re-boot after all it is only a gloryifed MP3 player with microsoft software.
It came to life and after a few minutes it was playing away like a good-un. Then the screen froze. None of the wheels would work but sound was still coming out of the speakers but i could not shut it down or adjust anything. Olny action open was to again, turn off at the mains. This time it stayed off until the evening..........
Anyway, it is now 2 a.m and i should be in bed. So lookout for the next exciting installment of
BEOSOUND 5 "It Came, It Unpacked, It stood in the corner looking SAD"
Perhaps the cardboard box idea was not so silly after all. BTW whilst writing this I have been listening to Tonto's Expanded Headband albums "Zero Time" and "It's About Time" Both from the 70's. I am afterall 4 and 50 years and to quote Yoda "when this old you become, a retro old fart you will be.
See you next time on Beosound 5.
"Will the cardboard box make it to the wall"?
"Will the music ever get loaded"?
" has this all been a terrible dream or an expensive reality"?
join us next time on...(Roll credits, queue music, oh sorry i can't) its a wrap
iain