Hyponx
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Beobuddy this is an awesome post. It’s fantastic to see repairs at this level for Beolab speakers in general.
I have dreamed of buying a pair of Beolab 5 personally but have worried about the issue of repairing the chassis. This adds considerably to my confidence in proceeding.
Assuming you offer repair services do you have a website/contact info and wherebout are you located in the world?
Cheers,
Hyponx
(EDIT: turns out you can only program it with dealer software, RIP)
Not directly related but this is potentially one option https://www.rticontrol.com/xp-3-control-processor.html
A bit pricey new but there’s some used ones floating around on EBay, IR frequency range is 15-460 khz so would probably work.
Fascinating product. It’s hard to say how big of a market something like this would have given the vintage nature of its application. But I’d certainly be interested personally. I have an older Beogram and a Beosound 9000 that I believe could employ this.
Open sourcing it or having a distributor for it would be an interesting development.
I myself have the Beolab 9’s which I’ve been very happy with, ultimately a system only needs to sound good to the listener.
That said it is interesting to see some measurements. The bass capability of the 20’s measured near 100 db (!) at 20 hz (even though there was quite a bit of distortion). Neat stuff for such a relatively small speaker.
Bump!
I have enjoyed reading their reviews of other audio products for some time. They are very focused on objective measurements and have been a welcome source of cutting through lots of snake-oil products that seem to infect the audio product space.
The tweeter dispersion results do seem disappointing and counterintuitive to the ALT design goal. I do wonder if the ABL loudness and also the room position dip switch selection didn’t negatively impact the measurements/listening test.
It would be interesting to hear what Geoff thinks of the results / testing methodology.
Best regards,
Hyponx
In fact if I remember the older bass management routing table on the older Beosystems the Beolab 9 is ranked higher than the Beolab 2 (plus you have 4 of them!). Though in theory with the new distributed bass system any additional bass driver is probably helpful to some degree.
Glad to hear you like your setup!
Hello BeoMedia,
I also had very similar target requirements when looking for my own setup and regrettably after a lot of searching I found no product that met all those requirements. I actually considered buying the Canton you did and am sorry to hear it doesn’t work well.
I ended up buying a Denon X4700h second-hand because it has a preamp mode that turns off all the amps dramatically reducing its power usage. This in turn lets me hide it in a closed cabinet safely. I am overall very satisfied with the unit in general.
But the unit is obviously massive compared to the Canton and much more expensive.
The step down X3700H also has the preamp feature, and with the new X3800H just announced perhaps it will go on sale in the near future.
You could try and find the older X3600H(2019), X3500h(2018) or X3400H(2017), possibly second-hand, all have the pre-amp outputs (just check that they have the necessary channel count for your setup) but the amplifier can’t be turned off so ventilation is more critical. Also they run HDMI 2.0 so only 4K60. But if you use eARC and the TV for higher refresh rate sources then that doesn’t really matter.
There is also an equivalent set of Marantz receivers that are near clones of the Denon, could look for those as well.
If someone knows of a better option I certainly wouldn’t mind hearing about it! I am hoping to move to the Beosound Theatre in the near future with my setup.
Best regards,
Hyponx
With the new bass-management system taking advantage of all drivers in the system my thinking is that the Beolab 9 would be the better choice over the Beolab 18 for rear speakers. This is because the 18’s are very limited on bass capability, below even the Beolab 17. The Beolab 9 with two 10″ bass drivers especially positioned on the opposite side of the listening space from the Theatre would give the net system a lot of capability to optimize bass output in the room. It will also give you MUCH more low frequency extension. Using the very similar Beolab 20 (still on the B&O website) bass capability is rated at 104 dB which is a massive leap from the Beolab 18’s 83dB).
Beolab 28 is a bit of a wildcard.
