AdamS
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If you’re near London then you aren’t far from Tim Jarman, who is in Farnborough, Hampshire and he would give the deck a thorough once-over for you.
You can contact him through his website here: https://beocentral.com/contact
I’ve owned two Beogram CD5500s and both of them had so much slack in the clamping mechanism that both regularly were able to clamp the disc off-centre and thus be unable to read it.
I’ve talked to Tim Jarman about it and even he just shrugged and confirmed that they pretty much all do it to a certain extent.
Lovely sounding player but it feels like a poor piece of design to me.
I’ve always used Speakerrepairshop and their products are excellent.
I would not recommend replacing the midrange foam surrounds with rubber. This will change the parameters of the drive units. Stick to foam.
Well, both Pentas are reassembled.
One seems to work but produces barely any sound, the other makes a ‘pop’ when you plug it in and goes straight into protection mode. The displays don’t work on either of them.
Looks like they’ll be converted to ‘Beovox’ Pentas for the time being to see if they work like this, as I haven’t got time to look into the amps further at the moment, and I’m supposed to be using them at the Hi-Fi WigWam show the weekend after next!
It’s a development of the Beogram 2402 that added Datalink for use with a suitably equipped Beomaster. More details oN beocentral here: https://beocentral.com/beogram6000-1980s
As Tim says, on the site, it’s a bit of an oddity, but still a decent deck, especially with an MMC20CL. I’d be buying it!
Finally getting round to sorting out my Beolab Penta 2s. I re-foamed the midranges earlier in the year so have now re-fitted them and am working on the amplifiers.
That’s the spirit!
Whereabouts are you located? Someone on here might be able to recommend a repairer near you.
It’s a truly wonderful amplifier, so whatever you do, DO NOT even consider “consigning it to the tip”!!
It’s a perfectly straightforward, if moderately complex, analogue amplifier design and so any half-decent repair person should be able to fix it, especially given that the service manual is available. I would say that it’s not unreasonable that it’s due for a bit of a service after 50 years.
Well worth doing, in my opinion. You’d have to spend a fortune to significantly better it.
Interestingly, the only Wi-Fi issue we’ve ever had is with our Beosound 1 (first generation).
It was located in the kitchen and the wireless router (a standard EE model that they supplied when we switched to 100MB fibre broadband) is in the lounge at the other end of the house.
When we first set this up, everything was fine but, as time went on, the Beosound 1 struggled more and more with the signal and eventually became un-listenable – continually breaking up and dropping out when streaming Spotify. We ended up putting it into a spare bedroom much closer to the router where it is fine. I then replaced it with the Beoplay M5 that I won in a Beoworld draw in the kitchen, which works perfectly, as does the Beosound Core in the dining room next door to the kitchen (and which is actually even further away from the router).
Has anyone else experienced the Wi-Fi performance of a B&O product worsening with time but with no other changes? The Beosound 1 now gets barely any use now it’s in the bedroom, but we love it and can’t bring ourselves to part with it!
It’ll be done in exactly the same way as on the Beolab 90s, I imagine – using DSP.
After doing a bit more research on this and discovering that it’s purely passive and needs an external amplifier and a Core to do anything approaching B&O integration, how does it get a “Beosound” moniker?
Surely, if anything, it’s actually a “Beovox” Bollard?
Indeed. Looking into it, it seems to be an Origin Acoustics product, although their DSP3-700 amplifier appears visually different to the Beoamp. Then again,. the instruction books are pretty much the same, so I’d need persuading just how much B&O DNA is in these.
I love them, but why on earth would you provide an analogue line-in using a USB socket?
What next? Mains in via an 8 pin DIN socket?!
So far my collection is: 6000/ 2400/ 2200 going to maybe find a 901 and a 5000 as well. I hope i am not missing anything else. Do the newer 1980s and 1990s units sound as good as the classic ones?
Yes – you’re missing Beomaster 8000! Still the best sounding receiver B&O ever made, in my humble opinion.
Some of the 1980s and 1990s units are very good, with the 5000 being a particular high. As has been mentioned, the later 5500/6500/7000 models never seem to sound quite as good, but they can be modified to undo these differences and make them sound much more like the 5000.
My vote would always be Pentas from this choice.
As most people on here know, I view the BL2 as an utter abomination that’s only good for boom, bang, thump and exploding helicopter noises, and is utterly hopeless for music.
IMHO, of course!
If you’re in Kent, then you’re in the right corner of England to take them to Tim Jarman in Farnborough.
You can contact him here: https://beocentral.com/contact
Yes – buy the cable you have linked to.
B&O decks screen the cable connection through the body of the DIN plug and so when you use a conventional DIN to phono adaptor you lose this connection and hum is the result.
If you want to double check first, take a bit of wire and attach one end to the earth terminal on the Cambridge Audio preamp. Then, tough the other end on the metal shell of the DIN plug – the hum should vanish. As a quick cheat until the adaptor arrives, you can unplug the DIN plug, fold the end of the wire just over the lip of its metal body (away from the pins) and plug it in – this will hold the wire in place temporarily!
