Well basically the header says it all:

My Ouverture is almost dead, and I'm giving serious thought to buying a BM/BS5. Don't think that I should wait for the Encore because I have a 5 room link setup. BUT I have just finished copying all my CD's to the computer, and I have more than 500 GB in WMA lossless, and don't want to go down in quality. Is it possible to expand the HD with another 500 GB?

To those of you lucky owners: would you buy it again?

Thanks

Although not offered by B&O you can upgrade the hard disk either yourself or the dealer. In both cases what you in essence do is making a low level copy of the hard disk on a new larger disk so all the software is preserved. Please be aware that the overall power of the system is limited (processor/memory) so I do not know how well it will work with extreme large libraries (although I do not foresee issues).

Than the harder questions; do you buy again

Sincerely I do not know. I use the system a lot. Is works fine, looks great and in general it is a pleasure to use. However there are a few things I do not like. Most of them are software related and one hardware As I wrote earlier, I would have loved it, when I could slid in a cd in [the BS5] as well. 

I have a lot of classical work on the my disk and I dislike the limited opportunities to to sort and access these on the BS5, putting in a cd is much easier/nicer in such cases. Also when a friend is passing by with a new cd, ripping and putting it on the BM5 is a bit overkill...

From a software perspective I really dislike the limited use of metadata. I have properly added all kinds of metadata to my music and I would like to use this metadata for sorting and selecting music. Currently I have nearly 500 albums on the BM5. If I would like to play music from a specific genre or componist/performer/... I can not use the BS5 for selecting on something else than Album title or Artist. Another thing is cooperation between Beo4/Beo5 and the BS5/BM5, skipping numbers/skipping albums is not how I would like it (more standard CD player approach). The way the favorites function works is awfully although this is partly due to the rudimental integration between the BM5 and the Apple computers I use. And so there are a bunch of smaller things as well.

So my advice would be, check the system out at the shop. Have a look at the your music collection, you habits for listening to your music, going through it and see how your usage fit within the capabilities of the system. If you like it Buy if not, wait for upcoming software release

Have a look here..

http://forum.beoworld.org/forums/t/35722.aspx 

and here...

http://forum.beoworld.org/forums/t/33436.aspx

as well..

At the question " would you buy it again ? ", without hesitation : YES !

I've been waiting a long time for « a digital music storage solution » from B&O and i must admit that i'm very happy.

I think maybe i'm one of the only few person on the whole forum who love the BeoSound 5 !

A big majority of people think that it lacks of features in comparaison with apple or sonos solution.

But for me, it's the perfect partner of my stored music.

And of course, it has the magic and class of great B&O product.

Ditto.

My warranty is out at the endo of Feb2011, and 1TB 2.5 inch HDDs are on he market. I will be looking to see if a straight cloning will alown me to upgrade.

10%

Put me down as another extremely happy BS5 owner.  I didn't realize how much I use it until it broke (a known production problem with the early models - this is supposedly all sorted out now), and I was without it for 2 weeks.  I still have all of my CDs (and a BS9000 to play them), but what a pain to find and choose, etc.

Stan

Yes, I would have loved the ability to play a CD without having to steal it first. I can play it on the DVD player in my BV7 though, but still why buy an audio player at that price to play CD's at your TV? This has taken me since the release to swallow... Unfortunately there is a sound-delay to the link rooms whenever playing from a video source. Hopefully there is no delay to link rooms from the BM/BS5? Can anyone confirm this, please???

So, it might be possible to copy the entire HD to a larger one, but not just add some extra GB? But nobody has actually tried this? Am I the only one with 1.500 CDs??? It is actually when this many CD's the advantage of digital storage is at its best: CDs take up much more space than LPs did... When copying my CDs to my PC I realised how many I hadn't heard for the past 10 years: they were turning upside down in the jewel case, because they were read upside down (or downside up???) in my old Beogram CD50 I could choose not to copy those to save space - BUT is the MOTS not all about rediscovering your collection???

Regarding the internet radio: Is it possible to give the stations numbers? If so, it should be possible to ad the stations logos to the Beo5 for easier link room control, right?

Danny:

But nobody has actually tried this? Am I the only one with 1.500 CDs??? It is actually when this many CD's the advantage of digital storage is at its best

I don't have 1500 cd's, but only around 8-900. Add to this a lot of 24 bit stuff, the vast majority of that audio is my own (both "real audio" and music, lol).  When all is said and done, I probably have the equivalent of 2500 cd's. Most of it in flac, and most of it, GB-wise, in 24bit/48kHz.

This is the reason I'm very interested in the "Encore"/MKII, even if it would mean I'd have to convert it all to WMA Lossless. If it lives up to what I hope it will live up to, I might just let my computer convert (and convert, and convert).

Hopefully for you BS5/BM5 lot, there will be a firmware update to allow the original BS5/BM5 to tap into an external hdd or NAS.

Danny:

Regarding the internet radio: Is it possible to give the stations numbers? If so, it should be possible to ad the stations logos to the Beo5 for easier link room control, right?

Yes, you can assign stations to "favorites" by number.  I've thought about adding logos, but haven't gone that far...  I don't have enough stations programmed that I can remember the numbers.

Stan