A few posts up there was a complaint about the AirPort express having to be plugged into the front of the BeoSound 5 Encore. Why would it ever be plugged in? Why wouldn't you just stream directly from your iTunes library? What good is airplay on your main stereo? I understand if a friend comes over and wants to play a song, but then they can just plug their iPod into the front. For the owner, their music is consolidated on a drive somewhere and would be streamed. 

Or is it just some odd desire to have an Apple capability no matter how worthless?

Off topic, but speaking of Apple, I'm so pleased with my Lion upgrade that I've ordered a ThinkPad X1. 

I really don't like the way my post has lead to a bashing thread ... Shi says it correctly:

shl:

It has nothing to do with price or apple... and when it comes to Airports; b&o put that in their video...

My disappointment is that B&O had the opportunity to make the Encore even more magical ... instead they appear to be promoting a cheap solution using wires when everything could have been wireless or behind the walls.

 

I have been looking at the DLNA iThing applications that other posters have mentioned in other threads, but I have yet to see something elegant ... I hope when B&O do bring out their wireless remote control App (not Beo6) for the Encore that it will knock our socks off

 

Paul Winn:

I don't think that it is because we are all 'Apple worshippers' it is simply because iTunes is the World's largest and most popular music store and will continue to be so. It is THE way that music is bought these days and used. It has been like this for over 10 years now, it's not an over night sensation!

 

The way music is obtained changes constantly. A track, reel to reel, Vinyl, tape, cd, burn cd's, MP3's and so on.

The reign of power will shift from Apple one day soon too. Just look at the growth of Spotify. The market has grown so much in one year that all the record companies eyes have finally opened wide! Why bother with trying to stop illegal downloads when a subscription for $20. dollars a year (or whatever it may be) can give you instant access to all the music in the world! Music will shift to an even more disposable culture much like cable/subscription T.V made movies and dramas. How many people actually go to the movies anymore when they have a surround sound cinema that is better at home. 

This is the way of the future and suspect that BeoSound 5 Encore will be able to cope with this future with software upgrades.

 

TripEnglish:

A few posts up there was a complaint about the AirPort express having to be plugged into the front of the BeoSound 5 Encore. Why would it ever be plugged in? Why wouldn't you just stream directly from your iTunes library?

If the Encore can pick up a password-protected iTunes library (or multiple libraries), ideal. I'm not fully sure how it will do that, but I'll wait to be surprised next week (when I see the configured Encore). As I've said, I'll pull the trigger on an Encore if it does this and enables me to control via my iPad/iPhone/computer.

I was never a fan of the whole Sound/Master 5 setup (too expensive, too many cables, flaky master etc), so if the Encore can do something better, cheaper and with far fewer cables, then this is ideal for me.

Trip, I think you misunderstand Apple fanboyism and people who simply have an existing setup and want the Encore to plugin to this configuration. I spent most of my time using Windows 7 during office hours and frankly perfer the OS to OS X. However, I still have a refurb Mac Mini Server with a password-protected central iTunes library, an iPad which can control the library, which can also be accessed via a Mac or a PC.

If the Encore simply acts as a PC or Mac and can control and display the iTunes library, superb. I await to be fully convinced.

It does. That's the whole point of the Encore concept. It puts all of your music sources into one basket. That's why I don't see the point of AirPlay on it. It's not that I don't want AirPlay on board, but it's just not that crucial. If it's pulling your entire library into the basket, why bother docking a device that has a small portion of that same collection?

My only real big complaint was that B&O pushed the sw update that gave us iPad control weeks and weeks before launching their own app. It's been pretty confusing for a lot of BS5 owners and hasn't delivered the elegant solution that people expect. 

As for Apple fanboyism in general, I could care less. I'm just sick of the locked in nature of their platforms. Since getting a Roku box I've stopped using my AppleTV. I've had spotify for a few days and have only used the iPod app for a book on tape. My iPhone has never pushed mail through as quickly and reliably as my Blackberries did. I also realized that while I've had 7 mac notebooks since 2002 all of which suffered some sort of physical failure, I've had the same ThinkPad the whole time. At some point I just fell out of love with the stuff. I'm guessing i'll go back to Blackberry when I switch cell carriers this year, too. 

 

Jez:

Paul Winn:

I don't think that it is because we are all 'Apple worshippers' it is simply because iTunes is the World's largest and most popular music store and will continue to be so. It is THE way that music is bought these days and used. It has been like this for over 10 years now, it's not an over night sensation!

 

The way music is obtained changes constantly. A track, reel to reel, Vinyl, tape, cd, burn cd's, MP3's and so on.

The reign of power will shift from Apple one day soon too. Just look at the growth of Spotify. The market has grown so much in one year that all the record companies eyes have finally opened wide! Why bother with trying to stop illegal downloads when a subscription for $20. dollars a year (or whatever it may be) can give you instant access to all the music in the world! Music will shift to an even more disposable culture much like cable/subscription T.V made movies and dramas. How many people actually go to the movies anymore when they have a surround sound cinema that is better at home. 

This is the way of the future and suspect that BeoSound 5 Encore will be able to cope with this future with software upgrades.

 

 

Indeed.

 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but  ( if I can be smug for  minute) I was in at the UK launch of Spotify - in fact, King Street shop had many playlists for the backgrounf & demonstration units in 2008/9  - and the fact Sonos integrates with Spotify ( and the similar legal version of napster) is THE reason why it is so well established as the de-facto wirelss multi-room system for so many AV installers.

 

Spotify is a joy to use - probably amounts to 70% of my music listening..... intuitive, easy to use and just all-round enjoyable..  Being over 40, I also still buy new CD's ( and LP's when I can ) and I use Spotify to "audition" potential purchases, as well as a way to explore artists/genres I am new to.

IMO, if the BS5 had a Spotify GUI that was halfway decent, it would be a revelation to so many of the B&O target demographic  ( I'm generalising here .but I mean  over 30 and not too techie)  that the product would fly off the shelves, and be the next Bsnd9000.  

People who are already using i-tunes and streaming music from a NAS around the house will be harder to convert - they are used to getting content via phones, ipads, & macbooks and syncing the lot..... they will be harder to sell BS5 to  - just like more techie types didn't rate Avant and Bsnd9000 in the late 90's ..... but they both sold heavily to the B&O marketplace. 

I believe there is a huge latent demand for an easy B&O solution to streamed music via Spotify/Napster....alongside access to already owned music, and B&O are nearly there.....

 

 

@TripEnglish :

I agree with you that using AirPlay for playing a part of one's iTunes library is totally useless... But Airplay can also be used to play the sound of a video from your iThing, to play the sound of Deezer/Spotify from your iThing (until it's directly supported by BS5), to listen to the music you're about to purchase on any online store... As I've said before, AirPlay is an elegant wireless input for every iThing (and don't say that B&O owners don't have iThings).

And again, if AirPlay is so useless, why did B&O put it in front of the BS5 on one of its first pictures?

Finally, you've just admitted it, you need a permanent Aux connected to your BS5 : you said that you're a Spotify user, and (not for a too long time I hope), if you want to listen to Spotify trough your Beolabs, you need to connect something to your Aux input... 

 

I don´t really care if there is support for airplay or not, but I am very suprised that there is no digital in... it seem like a huge oversight and something that could make this product so much more attractive.

mbee:

And again, if AirPlay is so useless, why did B&O put it in front of the BS5 on one of its first pictures?

Also AirPlay is used by third-party products such as Airfoil to enable you to stream non-Apple sourced audio to your various AirPlay compatible devices - you'd need an Airport Express to achieve this if the Encore doesn't have AirPlay support.

TripEnglish:

I've had 7 mac notebooks since 2002 all of which suffered some sort of physical failure

Well, that must be some kind of record. I don't have the stats to hand, but Apple notebooks are some of the most reliable around and Apple was voted number one for customer support recently. I've had two Sony laptops and, as they were made from plastic, broke within a year or so.

Remember Thinkpads are now developed by the Chinese company Lenovo and not IBM and have been for some time. Good quality products, but not the quality they used to be a few years ago.

I do agree about the iPhone and mail handling, however. It is slow. Painfully slow. Sometimes it appears to freeze for minutes. Same on the iPad.

I think for the time being I will consider a B&O tv (BV11 I reckon) with say a pair of BL3s and go the APPLE TV route. To me the Encore doesnt really offer anything more for me as an iTunes user than Apple TV for the extra £2500 unless i'm really missing something?

Forgive me if I'm missing something here too (honestly!). I don't know very much about the BS5, but I've been viewing a video on the B&O site featuring Tue Mantoni demonstrating the product. Now here's the first thing that struck me, particulary so bearing in mind the many B&O v Apple comments in this thread.

In the video Tue is extolling the virtue of being able to control the BS5 from a smartphone and iPad, describing this feature as 'really great' and 'cool'. Not only that he says, this feature is being incorporated into the BS5 'for free'...WOW!

What I cannot fully comprehend is why the BS5 has an expensive screen & control wheel if it's possible (preferable?) to play its content more conveniently from an iPad (or similar) held in the hand and seated on the sofa?

Why wasn't the BS5 introduced with a B&O styled separate, wireless, hand-held remote screen a la iPod/iPad?

To paraphrase my opening remark, perhaps I've misunderstood the whole concept of the BS5.  

 

Kokomo:

What I cannot fully comprehend is why the BS5 has an expensive screen & control wheel if it's possible (preferable?) to play its content more conveniently from an iPad (or similar) held in the hand and seated on the sofa?

Which is what I remarked on much earlier in the thread. If your music is on a NAS drive (drive on your network), you could use your iPhone or iPad to control the audio and simply connect your B&O speakers directly to the Airport Express and leave out the Beosound 5. It would be superfluous. That's why I was surprised B&O used the Airport Express connected to the Beosound 5 as an example. Just leave out the Beosound 5.

At the moment I do exactly what you're describing. Take the iPad around the house (or work) with me and use that to control music via my AirPlay controlled speakers, through different Airport Express devices (one connected to my BV7, one connected to the Beosound 4 etc etc). Remember you can use your iPad at work to stream audio from a remote location, across fast broadband.

The primary advantage of the Beosound 5 - apart from looking good - is that it has a better DAC than the Airport Express. So people are saying that if you have excellent audio stored on a NAS drive, you'd be better using the Beosound 5 to stream and convert the audio as the quality will be superior. However, one argument against this is that there's only so much you can do with compressed audio and, frankly, the speakers make a big difference. As someone else rightly pointed out, you might be better using the Beosound 5 money to invest in better quality B&O speakers.

I need to see this all for myself and weigh up the pros and cons when my dealer connects up their Encore, next week.

Kokomo:

Forgive me if I'm missing something here too (honestly!). I don't know very much about the BS5, but I've been viewing a video on the B&O site featuring Tue Mantoni demonstrating the product. Now here's the first thing that struck me, particulary so bearing in mind the many B&O v Apple comments in this thread.

In the video Tue is extolling the virtue of being able to control the BS5 from a smartphone and iPad, describing this feature as 'really great' and 'cool'. Not only that he says, this feature is being incorporated into the BS5 'for free'...WOW!

What I cannot fully comprehend is why the BS5 has an expensive screen & control wheel if it's possible (preferable?) to play its content more conveniently from an iPad (or similar) held in the hand and seated on the sofa?

Why wasn't the BS5 introduced with a B&O styled separate, wireless, hand-held remote screen a la iPod/iPad?

To paraphrase my opening remark, perhaps I've misunderstood the whole concept of the BS5.  

Forgive me !

I may have missed the video the first time I did the search and posted the links.

Silly but B&O stuck the video at the bottom of the email form by which time I had already tuned out and so missed it :-(

I agree ... watch the video and you will see the Beosound 5 been promoted with the use of a Smarphone when arriving home ("throw the music to the the Beosound 5") and an iPad with a Beosound 8 as a means of wirelessly accessing your collection in a remote room.

We always loved the BeoSound 5 (I have told the story before how SWMBO, the Fabric Selector, simple started demonstrating it one day in a B&O store to other prospects ... that's how intuitive and easy to use it is!)

The reasons we did not buy the BM5/BS5 back then was simply price / performance: I hope the Encore will solve that, and like others I will visit the store (iPad in tow) and check it out when it is released.

@moxxey: if Trip's Thinkpad goes back to 2002 then he probably got one that was still part of the IBM design and manufacturing heritage, and I have been using a Leonovo for some 18 months now as a workhorse, and it is fine in that role - my Apple is like my B&O something I treasure

the dac is very good. 96kHz 24bit sounds extremely good. I can't get the 192kHz working.

I'm testing the BS5 Encore with BL5000 - excelent combination 

 

I skipped lossy music several years ago. Only when I'm on a trip or in my car I listen to lossy. Today I expirienced again why I made this choise!

What is the iPhone/iPad app that Tue is using to play music to Beosound 5?

 

linder:

What is the iPhone/iPad app that Tue is using to play music to Beosound 5?

We looked at the clip very carefully, and the consensus was that he seems to be using a non-Apple, maybe Android based phone, so is it using the Bluetooth interface that they show on this link: http://www.bang-olufsen.com/beosound5-encore-bluetooth or is it something else ? If you look carefully at the clip you will see that instead of the Airport Express (that we have all being arguing about *sigh*) there seems to be a (B&O?) puck lying on the shelf and interfacing (perhaps?) to the Encore:

But that pic shows what looks very much like an iPhone 4. The placement of the earpiece, camera and side buttons are all exactly as on an iPhone 4.

Not to mention the positions of the antenna breaks. And the clincher is the home button. Only Apple uses the rounded off corner icon on the home button.

jonnyb:

But that pic shows what looks very much like an iPhone 4. 

I think he means in the video from Tue - it's a different thing entirely. However, in that video Tue mentions the use of an iPad etc, so whatever app he's talking about is definitely going to be available for iOS.

Does anyone else know what this Besound 5 app is about? On the Android market, I can only find the Beolink app, which was last updated in April: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ikatu.rbeo

Ah - sorry I misunderstood the point. 

On another note, how does the Encore connect to an iTunes library on a computer? I'm hoping wirelessly. Is this the case?

jonnyb:

On another note, how does the Encore connect to an iTunes library on a computer? I'm hoping wirelessly. Is this the case?

I'm hoping the guy who has just received his Encore can tell us. The Windows-only formatted drive point is worrying, but I think he means you can only connect Windows formatted USB drives directly to the Encore.

I also want to know how you configure the connect to a remote library via WiFi! The Encore user guide isn't on the B&O website?

jonnyb:

But that pic shows what looks very much like an iPhone 4. The placement of the earpiece, camera and side buttons are all exactly as on an iPhone 4.

Yes, but the picture of Tue is much harder (for my old eyes) to decipher ... however here it is for you ... hope you can tell us what he was using !

One thing's for sure: Bang and Olufsen could do a much better job of communicating how their new products work

Tue is looking at it as though to say "Oh dear, how do I sell that!" :)