Vintage Products

Re: Dealing with an 80's in-wall speaker system/beocenter 7700

folly — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:48:49 GMT

Thank you for the quick replies. None of that is very good news. I might (with some cringing) suggest trying to fish all the wiring down into another wall and just move everything they have now and run away fast. Buying another older system is really not possible.

Would it be possible to just hack off the connectors and put some new ones on and run the whole thing as one giant speaker somehow? (Sorry I'm an audio barbarian.)

In any case thank you for the info as it gives me some facts to deal with.

Re: Dealing with an 80's in-wall speaker system/beocenter 7700

Peter — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:30:09 GMT

A Beomaster 5000 would be far more compact and you can use any of the B&O CD players. It will work with the present system. They are relatively cheap - one with the MCP (which is different and better to the 7700 one) went for £45. You can attach a tape player and a record player and it will take up much less space. I would suggest getting it serviced as soon as you buy it. If you get a number of remotes, it can be controlled from any of the rooms.

What you have is a MCL82 set up. It will be very tricky to make it work with another make or a more modern B&O system.

Re: Dealing with an 80's in-wall speaker system/beocenter 7700

Craig — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 11:51:07 GMT

Hi, firstly welcome to Beoworld. You can as you say move the Beocenter to another room and connect the pair of Beovox s45's you have. All you will need are some standard DIN speaker connectors. You should be able to pick these up at somwhere like Radio Shack(are these still going in the U.S.?) or similar.

Could you not extend the current wiring from where it connects to the Beocenter's current position to where you are going to move it to. What you would need for this is some MCL wire. Not sure if a B&O dealer can still supply this, the 3 pin speaker connections you mention are exclusive to B&O and used for muliroom setups like you have. The 3rd pin on the plugs is to carry the data from each link room back to the Beocenter.

Craig

Dealing with an 80's in-wall speaker system/beocenter 7700

folly — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:57:29 GMT

My parents have a Beocenter 7700 that was professionally installed in the 80's with a vast number of speakers which are hardwired and inset into the walls and ceilings in various rooms. As you might expect, the time has come to make a few changes, and I'm trying to help them figure out what to do. They wanted to keep the Beocenter so they can play records, but move it. That's fine, we can move it to another room and hook it to some B&O speakers (Beovox s45) they have from some other long-lost system. (Though the S45 speakers have bare wire at the ends and need connectors)

The biggest problem is the house-wide speaker system. It only comes out of the wall in one location and the DIN connectors are similar to 2-pin speaker connectors but they have 1 flat and 2 tiny round pins. There is also a bundled nest of wires that goes to two small boxes with switches labeled for each room, which my father says turns the room speakers on or off. There are various black panels on the walls that look like the Master Link box covers. They have a Pioneer CD player which is now connected to the Beocenter as an Aux, which I assume is acting as the amplifier for it. I can recall the Master Control Panel from the misty past but I can't locate it now.

I was really hoping I could just find an adaptor for the wall speakers to be connected to an amp/CD player, but they don't seem to exactly match any diagrams I can find for female DIN to RCA adapters. And I'm not really sure about the speaker switch boxes and all the Master Link stuff. I don't want to tell them they have to go back to B&O and get a whole new B&O system--it's been hard enough just convincing my father to let my mother have a flat panel tv. (Athough I now suspect that his balkiness has less to do with the TV than knowing what a rat's nest of wires we're dealing with back there.) My mother insists she can't live without audio speakers in every room, even though she only uses them at Christmas.

I'm really baffled as to what approach to take. I just want them to be able to listen to cd's (maybe a future mp3 player) through the wall system. The old entertainment center won't hold the HD tv, the new ent center is on the way, the HD tv and satellite upgrade will arrive in a week, the Beocenter won't fit on the new shelves and now I'm in hot water for getting them into this because omg we won't be able to listen to the Kingston Trio Christmas album in the bedroom.

What I really really really don't want to do is order something on eBay and end up burning the house down. We are in the U.S.

Help! Thanks in advance for any advice.