Bang&Olufsen Beocord 5000 Cassette Deck Review

Slim of line and with the graceful Scandinavian styling that has traditionally marked Bang & Olufsen’s products, the Beocord 5000 two-head cassette deck offers a distinctive alternative to the appearance and operation of the typical Japanese-built recorder. B&O’s innovative design approach also extends to the deck’s electronic section, which, besides such standard circuit features as Dolby-B and Dolby-C noise reduction, incorporates the HX Professional headroom-ex-tension system.

Developed in close association with Dolby Laboratories, B&O’s HX Pro is not a noise-reduction system but rather a method of increasing the high-frequency storage capacity of a cassette tape. The basis for its operation lies in the discovery that high-level treble signals are to some extent “self-biasing.” That is, when the music being recorded contains a large high-frequency content, the tape behaves as if someone had actually turned the bias control up slightly. When this effect is combined with the bias supplied by the recorder, the tape becomes overbiased, reducing its treble capacity. In functional terms, what HX Pro does is to lower the regular bias component slightly at just those moments when the musical signal is itself supplying some bias to the tape, thus keeping the bias level constant. The system is demonstrably effective in its intended aim of increasing high-frequency headroom.

The drive system of the Beocord 5000 is straightforwardly constructed. The deck uses a single capstan, which is belt-driven by a d.c. servomotor. The same motor powers the fast-winding operations as well. A hardened permalloy head is used for both recording and playback. But while these aspects of the transport are conventional, its operation certainly is not.

When the Beocord 5000 is not in use, there are no visible switches or controls at all. As long as it is connected to an a.c. power source, however, it is not turned fully off but remains in a standby condition. Pressing the lower left corner of the front plate (marked open) causes the entire transport section to slide forward, rather like a self-opening dresser drawer, exposing the cassette well and the controls. At the same time a four-digit electronic tape counter in the front panel is illuminated, as are the letters l and R to identify the left- and right-channel record-level indicators.

Unlike almost all other hi-fi cassette decks today, the Beocord 5000 loads cassettes into its well from the top, not the front. This enables the deck to have a very low profile, though it makes loading and unloading cassettes slightly more difficult (especially since there is no eject button). Because there is no separate top cover—the transport section retracts into the main unit when open is pressed again or when the deck is left open and unattended for more than thirty minutes—access to the heads and capstan roller for cleaning and demagnetizing is unusually easy. Bias and equalization switching for ferric, high-bias, and metal tape types is automatic; there are no manual switches or user-adjustable controls.

To the right of the cassette well are twelve pushbuttons that control the transport functions. For the most part these are standard, though much of their nomenclature and some of their operations are not. For example, to make a recording it is necessary first to press the rec. open button, then the record button twice. Pressing stop will not immediately stop the tape at this point: a 4-second blank space is automatically inserted unless the stop button is hit twice. The advance and return buttons permit skipping ahead or going back by up to eight selections on a side (as determined by blank intervals), memo, set, memo, go, and start go are used for the usual memory-rewind functions. All of the buttons, which have no illuminators, are mounted nearly flush with the panel—so close, indeed, that we experienced difficulty in consistently activating them.

To the left of the cassette well are separate record-level slide controls for each channel and two three-position switches. One switch is used for noise-reduction selection, and the other selects line, microphone, or aux inputs. The aux input works only with matching B&O components or other European equipment using DIN connectors. No provision is made for playback-level control or headphone listening. Astonishingly, we found that there is no monitor circuitry: except during tape playback no signal is returned to the preamplifier or receiver. The monitor switch on your amplifier must be set for source instead of tape in order to listen to the music while recording.

Recording levels are shown by two eight-segment LED indicators on the front panel. In addition to reading peak rather than average signal levels, these indicators are equalized, meaning that they reflect the treble and bass boost that is applied to all signals before they reach the record head. This is certainly the most accurate way to prevent treble saturation of a tape. There are no decibel markings on the LED indicators, though the lights turn from green to red at a point that the manual identifies as “0 dB,” which we found is set at the Dolby calibration level of 200 nanowebers per meter at 400 Hz.

All connections to and from the Beocord 5000 must be made with adaptors that mate with the unit’s DIN-type sockets. One phono-plug adaptor is supplied; it consists of a DIN connector at one end of four 6-inch cables terminating in unmarked phono plugs whose identity must be learned by trial and error. Even the microphone jack, which can accept two microphones (with the right adaptors), uses a DIN connector. No connections are made to the rear panel of the deck since the DIN connector for its normal inputs and outputs is at the end of a permanently attached 1-meter cable. When we first looked at the rear of the Beocord 5000, we were concerned to see exposed power-supply circuit boards within easy finger reach through the ventilation holes. The deck is approved by Underwriters Laboratories, however, so it meets their rules regarding shock hazards. It still doesn’t seem like a good idea to have live circuit boards so easily accessible.

Overall, the Beocord 5000 measures 16-1/2 inches wide, 12-3/4 inches deep when closed or 17 inches deep when the drawer containing the transport mechanism and controls is slid out, and 3 inches high. It weighs 18-1/2 pounds. Price: $695.

Laboratory Measurements

The data supplied with our sample of the Beocord 5000 indicated that the unit had been adjusted using TDK AD (ferric), Maxell UDXL-II (high-bias), and TDK MA (metal) tapes, so we used these for our measurements. Similar high-quality tapes would have yielded almost identical results. The playback response of the unit was checked with IEC-standard calibrated tapes from BASF. Except for an inaudible “head bump” of 2.5 dB at 40 Hz, it was very flat (less than 2 dB total variation) out to 16,000 Hz. At 18,000 Hz the response was down 2.5 dB with the 70-microsecond (chrome/metal) tape and 3.5 dB with the 120-microsecond (ferric) tape.

At the — 20-dB level used for overall frequency-response measurements, response for all three tape types was within ±2.5 dB from approximately 32 to 20,000 Hz. At the IEC 0-dB level (250 nWb/meter), the response was again remarkably uniform among the three tape types. Normally, metal tapes show markedly better resistance to high-frequency saturation (overload) than chrome or ferric types do. In this case, however, thanks to the built-in HX Professional head-room-extension system, the performance of all three types was essentially the same, since the system “helps” the lower- coercivity tape types proportionally more than it does the high-coercivity metal variety.

Recordings made at the deck’s “0-dB” level with TDK AD, Maxell UDXL-II, and TDK MA showed third-harmonic distortion of a 315-Hz tone of 0.7, 2.4, and 1.2 per cent, respectively. (The input level to the CrЩ2-equivalent Maxell UDXL-II had to be raised by 1 dB, until the first red LED lit up, in order to produce a 0-dB recorded output, which probably accounts for that tape’s higher distortion.) At the 3 per cent third-harmonic distortion point, the recorded output levels were +3.6, + 1, and +3.8 dB for AD, UDXL-II, and MA, respectively. The resulting signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) measurements, unweighted and without noise reduction, were 49.8, 50.7, and 52.8 dB. With Dolby-B and IEC A-weighting these figures improved to 65.6, 65.1, and 66.8 dB, respectively. A-weighted S/N’s with Dolby-C measured 68.5, 69.5, and 71.8 dB. The B&O specs use CCIR-weighted rather than A-weighted curves, and thus show higher S/N’s with Dolby-C: 72, 74, and 73 dB, respectively, for the three tape types. We confirmed these claims, measuring 75.3, 74.2, and 75.2 dB for CCIR-weighted S/N’s.

Wow-and-flutter from the Beocord measured 0.03 per cent wrms and 0.05 per cent DIN peak-weighted, which is unusually good for a single-capstan design. Fast-forward and rewind times, however, were slow: 107 seconds for a C-60 and 155 seconds for a C-90 cassette. Tape speed was only 0.4 per cent slow, which is negligible for almost all listeners. Line input sensitivity for a 0-dB indication was a very normal 58 millivolts (0.058 volt), with an output of 530 millivolts at this level.

Comment

Whether you consider the styling of the Beocord 5000 attractive is a matter of taste. We cannot, however, but admire the originality of the design. And certainly the unit did a very good job in both recorded and playing back music of various types. The HX-Professional system does extend high-frequency headroom, as claimed, and we could detect no undesirable sonic side effects of its operation. We are still mystified why such a beneficial development has not appeared on more recent tape decks. While it is always possible, using digital Compact Discs, to find musical passages that not even Dolby-C can handle without some residual tape hiss (provided one is listening at an elevated level), we were very pleased with the sonic performance of the Beocord 5000.

Read all

Bang&Olufsen reviews

Read all