Beovox RL was available in four sizes, each with its own sound experience generated by size and strength.
The speakers accentuated different sound facets when positioned in different ways. Special fittings allowed you to position the three largest RL speakers as you wished. Suspended from the ceiling or on the wall. Standing in a corner or on a shelf. Or placed discreetly on the floor – either on a stand or in direct contact with the floor if you really wanted heavy bass sound – for dancing for example. The hard moulded plastic shell had no parallel surfaces, and the space between the bracing ribs was covered with asphalt. This special construction ensured a pure and authentic sound experience – with minimal cabinet resonance.
The special fittings, available as accessories, made it possible to tilt and turn Beovox RL speakers, in order to focus the sound towards your listening position, giving you the perfect stereo perspective.
Beovox RL was available in four sizes, each with its own sound experience generated by size and strength.
The large RL 7000 model was equipped with two bass speakers, a mid-frequency unit with separate inner cabinet and a powerful dome treble unit. The cabinet was slightly concave in the treble area to eliminate reflection. Beovox RL series included three smaller loudspeakers equipped with a selection of units varying in size and number.
The speakers accentuated different sound facets when positioned in different ways. Special fittings allowed you to position the three largest RL speakers as you wished. Suspended from the ceiling or on the wall. Standing in a corner or on a shelf. Or placed discreetly on the floor – either on a stand or in direct contact with the floor if you really wanted heavy bass sound – for dancing for example. The hard moulded plastic shell had no parallel surfaces, and the space between the bracing ribs was covered with asphalt. This special construction ensured a pure and authentic sound experience – with minimal cabinet resonance.
The special fittings, available as accessories, made it possible to tilt and turn Beovox RL speakers, in order to focus the sound towards your listening position, giving you the perfect stereo perspective.
BeoCom 2 is a visually provocative response to everything looking alike in today’s telephone market. Its curved shape is very reminiscent of telephones used in the 1960’s, particularly in ‘The Prisoner’ TV series on the UK’s ITV network.
The release of BeoCom 2 in March 2002 was undertaken in its basic form. It was not a ‘system’ telephone in the first instance in that only one BeoCom 2 base could support one BeoCom 2 handset. This means there was no data exchange with other BeoCom2 handsets or BeoCom 6000 handsets or bases.
However, October 2002 saw BeoCom 2 become a full system DECT telephone, becoming part of the same 3-component solution that BeoCom 6000 uses. With this software update, customers can now ‘mix and match’ up to six BeoCom 6000 or BeoCom 2 handsets and chargers, using either the PSTN or ISDN base. This free software upgrade – to be carried out in dealers’ showrooms – will be necessary on existing BeoCom 2 phones in order to make them fully functional as a system phone.
Ringing the changes
The unique ringing tone of BeoCom 2 was created by musical composer, Kenneth Knudsen. Born in 1946, Knudsen is a self-taught musician and since graduating from the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1974, he has chosen music as his profession. Over the years he has appeared on more than one hundred records with groups and soloists including Svend Asmussen, Miles Davis, Shubidua and the Indian violinist L. Subramaniam. He has been a member of, and recorded with groups like Secret Oyster, Coronaria Dans, ANIMA, Entrance, Bombay Hotel and Heart To Heart Trio. His list of compositions includes music for ballet, film, TV productions and jingles, as well as works for string quartet, solo guitar, solo cello, cello and piano, and choir.
In recent years Kenneth Knudsen has composed and recorded music for sound installations in various architectural and artistic contexts. As a soloist Kenneth Knudsen has released a number of CDs in his own name, most recently Sounds and Silence (dacapo DCCD 9419) and Music for Eyes (dacapo DCCD 9433).
Ringing the tune
The old-fashioned bell is nowadays rarely used in modern telephones. Like other bells, the sound from it contains a lot of overtones.
This is why you can both hear it at the bottom of the garden as well as close-by, and still experience the ringing of the bell as a pleasant sound. However the bell takes up too much room and it is too expensive for modern telephones. The technology that replaces it is both cheaper and more compact, but quite different to listen to. The design group found that this development was not exactly a positive one for the user. Therefore Bang & Olufsen turned to the Danish composer Kenneth Knudsen and asked him to compose a different ringing tune.
The Beocom 2 ring sounding like like cow bells is apocryphal! As visitors to Bang & Olufsen’s Struer headquarters know, there are no cows outside the Farm… only sheep! The ring of the BeoCom 2 was based on the sound of a piece of tubing falling on the floor. David Lewis was carrying a piece of metal tubing which he accidentally dropped to the ground. He thought the sound so interesting that a composer was called in to sample the sound and make a ring tone!
Knudsen chose to compose his tune as part of the design for a special telephone – the BeoCom 2 – rather than choosing an isolated, general tone, applied to all telephones. He therefore asked David Lewis, the chief designer of BeoCom 2 to make the final choice to ensure that the ringing tune was in harmony with the rest of the telephone. In this way the qualities of the ring became a harmonic part of the entire aesthetical experience of the new telephone.
To give the new ringing tune full justice the company’s acoustic department developed a small loudspeaker system in its own sealed enclosure within the handset of BeoCom 2 playing through a well defined slim opening within the phone’s aluminium tube.
Calling for attention
During the development of ideas for BeoCom 2, the design group expressed a wish that the ringing tune should call for attention in a polite way: a polite offer to make contact with the user, rather than a dominating, insisting demand.
But what is polite and what is not? How is this determined?
Bang & Olufsen asked the composer Kenneth Knudsen to solve this problem. Kenneth Knudsen came up with a number of solutions, from which designer David Lewis could choose.
Nearly each week of every year David Lewis drives in his car from Copenhagen to the B&O factory in Struer – a trip of 750km. During these long hours he would listen to Kenneth Knudsen’s pre-recorded tunes and discovered that in heavy traffic situations, where he was under pressure, he could clearly distinguish the pleasant call for attention, from other more annoying, ‘insisting’ tunes. He had therefore found the right tune for his new phone!
BeoCord V8000 video tape recorder matched the Beovision MX range of Bang & Olufsen televisions in looks as well as performance.
You could store a channel on the Beovision MX TV and it was automatically communicated to the V8000. Recording was a simple matter of selecting the programme directly from Teletext using the Beo4 remote control. It could be positioned by using one of the stands as part of a Beovision TV.
BeoCord V8000 rewound a three-hour tape in 95 seconds and it shifted from fast forward to play in a split second.
Other features included NTSC stereo playback. Looks-wise it embodied a black fascia with a choice of cabinets in pearlescent shades of blue, green, red, grey and black, plus glossy grey and glossy white.
Beocord VX7000 video cassette recorder was operated and programmed with the Beo4 remote control (although could equally, if not be better controlled, through the previous two-way Beolink 5000 remote control unit) through Beovision MX models.
All channels stored on the TV were simultaneously stored on the VX7000. In 1995 a new model was released specifically designed to operate through the Beo4 remote control unit and lost the two-way communication that had been one of its greatest selling points.
Features: hi-fi stereo VCR; NICAM/A2, PAL/NTSC converter; Beo4 remote control (1995 models onwards); black fascia; cabinet in the same colour schemes as the Beovision MX7000 plus black.
A special Bang & Olufsen feature was ‘spontaneous videotaping’. If you wanted to record the programme you were watching it was simply a matter of pressing ‘record’ twice on the remote control handset – and the VCR would automatically find the right channel and start taping.
You could with Beocord VX5500 play back in slow motion all the way down to still. You could use the picture-in-picture module with the VCR and the B&O TV on which you had it linked up to and it was also possible to keep your video tapes organised. By using a graphic ‘notebook’ you could name every video tape you record. Then you use the Beolink 5000 or Beolink 1000 terminal to simply order up the number of your recording.
Designed by David Lewis, Beocord VX5000 was the flagship of the range in the late 1980’s, with the ability to display live pictures from up to nine different channels simultaneously. A TV guide that was hard to beat! The VX5000 worked best with a Bang & Olufsen TV, simply because they were made for each other. You could choose from either the contemporary MX or the classic LX series.
Beocord VX5000: the multi-role video recorder
Designed by David Lewis, Beocord VX5000 was the flagship of the range in the late 1980’s, with the ability to display live pictures from up to nine different channels simultaneously. A TV guide that was hard to beat! The VX5000 worked best with a Bang & Olufsen TV, simply because they were made for each other. You could choose from either the contemporary MX or the classic LX series.
Step by Step
When you wanted to analyse a Wimbledon championship down to the last detail you would find the slow motion facility a real boon. And of course it was superb for picking up tips to improve your sporting style. You could also freeze frames, not only on video, but also in the middle of a direct broadcast; the picture quality remained at its impressive best.
We all know how complicated programming some video recorders can be. With the Bang & Olufsen range you don’t need a degree in pure maths to succeed. A ‘menu’ on the screen gave you straightforward instructions. So easy that you would want to take advantage of programming that lets you preset recordings of up to six different programmes up to one year in advance!
There was a very handy Search function too; acting like the ‘Track Searching’ on an audio cassette recorder, it took you to the programme you want with minimal fuss and bother.
Video or all-night music
The VX5000 gave you the choice of either four hours of video, or up to eight hours of top-quality hi-fi sound to last the whole night through!
Beocord VX5000 was designed specially be use in conjunction with Beovision MX5000 TV when, together, you could pull in a live picture from another channel on the screen while you continued with the programme you were already watching. Very handy when you were waiting for a specific programme on another channel to start. Much the same could be done in later years with the advent of Picture-in-Picture – a module bought as an accessory for fitting into your television.
Beocord V6000 was a hi-fi stereo video cassette recorder designed to work with Beovision models ME6000 and MS6000.
Together they formed an integrated unit in which TV and video cassette recorder automatically share all commands and can be operated by the same remote control. This combination was designed to be used as a standalone TV/VCR combination. The VCR had all playback facilities as any standard VCR. It also had VPS/PDC and NTSC playback. The video recorder was controlled via a Beolink 1000 handset through the Beovision television.
Bang & Olufsen’s new generation of TV and video systems at the time that the V6000 was released, made it simpler an more comfortable to watch TV. All data stored in the TV: time and programme channels, were automatically stored in the VCR as well. The same applied when you connected your TV and video recorder to a Beolink system – the clocks on the various units within the system were automatically synchronised.
