XavierItzmann
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«actually art up to 1000×1000 is accepted by the BS5 Encore. Above this size the B&o picture is shown.»
Thank you Carolpa! Yes, I had found some very large art just gave me the B&O logo and I was using 600 x 600 as an approximate rule of thumb.
Now, when you indicate 1000 x 1000 as a formal limit for the Encore, does that also apply to regular old BS5/BM5 as well?
And on a separate matter, I am curious: the sw is different, right? I mean the BS5/BM5 is Windows Embedded, the Encore must be something else altogether?
Hello Roland,
Did you «Buy a new cable with a 3 pin connector to connect to the original cable to the ML-PL-module and solder the new cable to the two soldering points of the optical connector on the solder side of the Via motherboard» ?
My system works fine and I hope I don’t have to buy a new motherboard anytime soon and even though I find the thought of soldering anything on a motherboard quite daunting, I’m thinking perhaps I should buy this cable now before it becomes difficult to find?
Best,
I have a BS5/BM5, not a BS5 Encore, and store my music on the BS5/BM5.
My tagging I do via iTunes on a Mac: I use the Mac to import from CD, I let the Mac deal with all the metadata, except the album art —because the album art the Mac assigns doesn’t get copied when I export the music to the BS5/BM5. Instead, I import my own album art into iTunes.
I then export the music to the BS5/BM5. As long as the album art is 600 x 600 or smaller, the BS5 is very happy with the metadata and it all stores and displays correctly on the BS5.
What is the white pole with a golden sphere at the end?
Nice setup!
Keith: OMG. You really shouldn’t.
Lee and Keith: Thanks for everything you do.I’d suggest an annual prize, if and only if funds allow. And Lee, you should never ever dip into your pocket.
With regard to my comment to Keith: the reason I was away for years is because I was out cruising on a yacht. We owners of Amel sailboats kept in touch via an active webforum. This forum was for many years hosted by Yahoo Groups, so there was no cost to the “organization” such as it is. In 2019 it was transferred over to Groups.io. The group remains healthy and all sorts of advice and manuals are freely given. Every few years even a meetup has been organized, and all because of the group’s camaraderie.
What does this have to do with B&O? Well, if you think the B&O market is becoming rarified, how does a French brand that makes less than 100 yachts/yr sound to you? The Amel forum also has no factory sponsorship whatsoever; in fact, Amel has at times competed by making its own but only for new product buyers!
Look, you could preserve the front of the website for membership upgrades and manual library… and push off the forum to a cloud platform. Having the front of the website would help you maintain the search engine SEO. And there is no law saying that you couldn’t extract the “top most-attended posts” and also repost them on beoworld.co.uk as read only as a tool to maintain SEO; users interested in that “headline” section would click thru to the forum.
Around 2013 on the Amel forum there was a proposal to do a self-host like Keith does, and to abandon Yahoo. I supported that idea until I got a little private talk from one of the “elders” that they didn’t want to go with self-hosted precisely because if the volunteers retired for whatever reason, the community would die. I desisted in quiet disagreement but now I see the complete wisdom of these people and am glad they had a foresight some of us didn’t!
Thanks again for all you do, fellows.
With regard to your product info screen cap, we have the exact same, with the following exceptions:
- My BS5/BM5 Application is 7.04.01.1945. Since everything else is pretty much the same, I wonder if you haven’t updated to the latest version. I let mine update itself a couple of months ago and has worked fine since (it also worked fine before). Others on this forum have confirmed that this version is the latest —and last, in all probability.
- My BM5 OS Update is 7.03. Comment is the same above.
- My BS5 BOM is 5, yours is 3. I have no idea what this is, but I speculate this characteristic is immutable from the time the device was built.
- My serial numbers are a bit higher than yours, but that’s probably very irrelevant.
The command on my Mac to connect to the BM is as follows:
Finder > Command K > smb://192.x.y.z/BM-SHARE$
Where “192.x.y.z” represents the exact same address as displayed on the BS5 under:
Service Mode > Network Info > IP Address
From your screen cap it looks like this here paragraph you already have figured out, but it wouldn’t hurt to double-check.
My OS is MacOS Monterey 12.6.3 running on a 2014 Dual-Core Intel i5
Other than that, all I can say is that Samba on the Mac sometimes is cantankerous, and that a single-character “A” password might not be welcome by the system. FYI my BM5 password is more than 20 characters long, and it contains the characters – and $, not necessarily only once, and a mix of lowercase, uppercase and numbers. I’m not saying you _need_ a long pass, because you obviously do not, but you may want to experiment with at least 9 characters, at your pleasure, but do make the first character a regular letter, just in case. Remember, the Mac will typically save this password, so you may in fact only have to type it on the Mac once.
One final voodoo thing to try is to reboot both BM5 and Mac _after_ you have entered the new pass on the BM5, and then try and login from the Mac.
Once you get this working, please comment back on this forum, so it may be of help to others in the future.
As I have the exact same setup, if you are there, we can try a few things. Let me know.
Going from memory here. I’ve owned a BeoCenter 2300 (purchased in 1997), replaced with a BeoSound 3000 about a decade later. They both look and operate the same, except the BC2300 had the small clamper and I think the BS3000 has superior Master Link capabilities. I used to know these things but have forgotten.
When my beloved BC2300 started skipping tracks, I could have gotten it fixed but I seem to recall that commenters on this forum may have mentioned the design with the small clamper wasn’t optimal, and so eventually it would fail again. Mind you, I think the clamper was not the issue, but rather, the laser! —the machines with the small clamper had a curved track for the laser, whereas the machines with the big clamper had a straight track. Since I was very much into my Master Link network at the time, I opted to replace, rather than repair.
There is a certain mechanical honesty in displaying the disc spin beneath the small clamper; the aesthetics are far superior to that of the big clamper when the disc is playing. I was starkly reminded of this when a BeoCenter 2500 appeared in a recent 007 movie —the BC2500 more or less the same machine as BC2300, with the small clamper, but also with a cassette player.
My BS3000 with the big clamper has yet to fail in any way, but frankly, my old BC2300 got far, far more CD playing hours in that decade or so than my BS3000 has in the decade-and-half since, so the jury is still out!
Catalin, this will be no consolation to you, but it is part of the price of enjoying powered speakers. Yes, the mechanical tweeter itself is unlikely to have failed so early —and rarely fails on non-powered speakers.
But powered speakers are a different animal, with power supplies and amplifiers a minimum starting point. Your speaker has a dedicated amplifier just for the tweeter, for example. And then you have wireless power speakers, often with both wireless and wired network input, digital analog converters, room acoustics evaluators, and who knows what else. Many B&O speakers include a web server, to cite an example (it is the “web” page inside the speaker you can access to configure the speaker).
If you had told me in 1997 when I purchased my first B&O system that someday each speaker would serve its own web pages I would have said: nuts! Now I see the value.
These are complicated computer systems. Just the inside of any of the microchips inside may include tens of thousands of transistors or more.
The world we live in.
For years I used a Mac Mini (purposefully with no updates beyond 10.6.8) with LinkPlayer 1.1. The Mac Mini was in the same room as a BL3500; other devices were elsewhere in the house, Master Linked.
The pleasant surprise with LinkPlayer were the display screens on the BL3500 and the BS3000… where those under B&O PC software simply displayed “N.Music” or N.Radio”… under LinkPlayer, the radio station name or the song’s title were displayed. If I recall correctly, the BL3500 simply showed the first few letters, whereas the BS3000 continually scrolled thru the entire name.
Also, while the N.Radio was buffering up —this back then took a second or two longer than it does now—, the B&O screens displayed “LOADING”!
I bring this up because now that I have a BS5, the BS3000 sits there, pathetically displaying a static “N.Music” or “N.Radio”, and makes one think that if an independent developer was able to exploit the network to its full potential, why didn’t B&O do it?
Of course the downside is that for some reason my Mac forgot it had a paid license to LinkPlayer (the battery died during the 8 long years of storage, so on restart it thought we were in 2000, and then jumped to 2023)… and now the required esellerate.net servers don’t work, so I can’t activate my LinkPlayer copy even though I have the original receipt with a code —this limits functionality to one hour.
Yes, I am not likely to ever use that setup again, but makes one pause and think that Phil moved on (I don’t blame him)… and yet the PC version of the software by B&O still works (most radio stations excepted).
One cheer, therefore for corporate products, at least for as long as the company doesn’t go bankrupt!
Thanks, MM!
Since these BLC’s had recommended auto-update, most good ones should be on 1.4.3.19864!
Now I just have to get one.
Ahh, yes, Rolf, thanks for your detailed advice. The current range of Connected products is set by default on software “auto-update”, so when devices currently updated by B&O cease to be upgraded, most will be left on the final version.
Which prompts me to ask… at the time the BLCs were current, did “auto-update” exist? Because then you’d be doubly right to question the full functionality of items being sold with less than the final version!
(unless the devices were stored in a drawer, one might think).
Thank you Johan.
I’ll be asking any sellers about the software version installed on their BeoLink Converter NL/ML, and will only buy if it is 1.4.3.19864 or higher.
Thank you Guy. I ran the “BeoPort update” and it ran successfully. No change to my situation.
I also found an old thread on the archived forums where it was revealed that BeoMaster 5 radio updates were terminated a few years ago, with a few surprised comments from BeoSound 5 owners… after all, BeoSound 5 incorporates a BM5 !!!
But the comments on the thread appeared to confirm that BM 5 N.Radio updates were a thing of the past; there was quite a bit of puzzlement that B&O had actually used different databases for two products which were apparently one and the same.
Methinks the radio db for BeoPort and for BS 5 are also distinct.
I’ve been listening to BS 5 radio heavily in the last few days. Last night I went thru all of the BBC channels (most by far do work) and then Spanish radio (after a few dozen radios I was still on “b”, so I gave up) and then I’ve been going through every station on the “jazz” category. Right now I’ve had “101 Jazz” from the US for a few hours, which I flip back to “101 Smooth Jazz”, its next door neighbor, every hour or so at the first hint of an advert.
I’d say well over 95% of stations work.
What sw version are you using?
As a placeholder until a new system arrives, I have set up a BeoPort (BP) and a BeoLab 2000 to run headless —no PC. The audio source is a Wiim connected to the BP where it normally expects to get sound from the PC. No IR eye needed, as BL 2000 accepts Beo4 IR commands.
The setup is:
1. connect the BP’s USB to the PC running BP software.
2. press N.Music on Beo4. Any sound coming from the Wiim plays.
3. Disconnect the USB (this shuts down the BP program on the PC).
For as long as power is not cut off or any of the buttons on the BL 2000 depressed, the BL remains available to play any AirPlay stream from any device. I’ve had this running for a week. You can control volume with the BL 2000’s metal knob, or with the WiiM or with your iPhone. On this room, do not leave any Beo4s laying around.Alternative if Beo4 not available: Play any N.Radio or N.Music from PC; this opens the BP’s port that sends any available audio out to the ML net. Press the “PLAY •” button on the BL 2000.
I was never much of an N.Radio listener in the years I had the BeoPort hooked up until I put it away in 2014.
Now that I have a BS 5, I have been playing with N.Radio and dug out the BeoPort. Some comparisons between the BS5 and the BeoPort (BP) on Windows 10 Home 21H2 build 19044.2251:
• Very few radio stations work on the BeoPort, and even those which work can’t be relied upon 100%. Even a “dependable” station appears to play from first selection only about 3/4ths of the time. If the “dependable” station doesn’t start, going to another station and coming back will usually work after a couple of times. Sometimes it will start on its own after a few minutes.
• The radios are sometimes labeled differently on BS 5 vs BP. One BP-working station I found had two different label endings on the BP (only the 1st worked) whereas on BS 5 the “two” stations had exact same labeling and same audio, so on BS 5 it appeared to be a repetition of the same station.
• BBC on BP starts with Afghan Network, Afrique, Arabic, AsianNetwork Gold, Burmese, etc. On BS 5, BBC starts with Asian Network, CWR, Essex, Guernsey, Hereford & Worcester, etc. Eventually going down the list you come to BBC World Service Afghan Network, World Service Afrique, Arabic, “BBC World Service Bangla”, etc. Inconsistent labeling results on different alphabetical positioning.
The argument that Windows 10 broke BeoPort N.Radio is a bit suspect, don’t you think? If it had broken N.Radio then nothing would work? How come a very few stations appear to be relatively reliable?
I read about a decade ago, or longer —probably in this forum— that MasterLink is a type of RSC-232 communications network, first introduced in 1960 (or was it its cousin RS-422 from 1975?). If true, it is probably a subset of the full protocol. If true, it is not an “analogue” network, but a digital one —for the command and control. The sound distribution itself is evidently analog.There is the masterlink input (large rectangle socket) that is THE usual input. It is analogue but it need some dark digital protocol to be started.I cloned the BM5 disk drive using a $25 “FIDECO Hard Drive Docking Station Support Offline Clone” on Amazon. The steps were:
1. Connect the cloner to power, but leave it off
2. Insert the original 1TB B&O 3.5″ drive on bay 13. Insert a $66 “Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch Internal SSD” on bay 2
4. Turn on the power switch, depress the “Clone” button for 3 seconds
The process took less than 4 hours (just a handful of CD’s on the BS 5). I had some trepidation because it turns our the actual Crucial box doesn’t advertise itself as 1TB, like Amazon does, but instead as 1000GB. And 1000GB < 1024GB, so I half-expected the cloning would fail.
But no, the BS5 started up flawlessly and has been playing N.Music and N.Radio for over one hour. We’ll see if problems crop up later.
I am indebted to all those who contributed to the epic 210-post “Upgrade beomaster 5 harddisk” thread from June 2013 to February 2022.
Thank you Forrest.
While I myself have never done a thermal paste renewal, it seems that all the old-gear Macintosh experts renew the paste on their computers after a bit over a handful of years. It stands to reason that the same process should be done in any other systems that also employ thermal paste from the factory.
Heat is the enemy of electronics, dramatically shortening lives that could be into the decades. The A6 evidently self-protects against overheating. One wonders if there are other, possibly older B&O systems that simply hara-kiri themselves in a heat daze.
