Bear in mind I am not the electronics engineer of our company,
Keith is quite right that the BeoLab 3500 works exactly as he described above.
Martyn our engineer has re-designed a circuit board to enable any BeoLab 3500 to work in the same way as any normal PowerLink speaker, regardless of version or software and without the need for beolink wireless.
It gives further flexibility to this speaker allowing it to be utilized in many more different scenarios. For example think of it as a pair of BeoLab 6000s with many more placement options, or as a 7.1 centre speaker connected just via PowerLink, an addition in the new year will be an IR Socket so that if used with a BeoVision 4 & BeoSystem 2 there would be no need for a separate external IR Eye.
The MasterLink socket is unaffected by this upgrade.
The only thing to note is that the MasterLink and PowerLink sockets on the BeoLab 3500 cannot be used at the same time, but then I cant think of a scenario when this would be necessary.
Hope this helps