William B. Kayen

Will be picking up my Q5 this week and want to know if the B & O radio was worth the upgrade. I ordered it in mine and want to make sure I didn't make a mistake.

JohnBoyToo

WELL worth it in our humble opinion !!!

We had the sunroof open yesterday coming home and got a thumbs up from the couple in the car next to us

Jusforfun

Assuming the reporting rate of B&O on forum hasnt changed. Its popularity grows each year
MY 2009 1 in 28 got it
MY 2010 1 in 24 got it
MY 2011 1 in 11 got it
MY 2012 1 in 7 so far

Either that or it got cheaper, you guys got more money to spend or its part of some package now.
I dont think you are going wrong with it!

UrbanExtant

You'll hear varying opinions on this site. In both our A4 and Q5, the B&O took a couple weeks to "break-in." Some will say it was just our ears adjusting to the sound, but I beg to differ. We had our A4 for 3 months before the Q5 arrived, and we could go directly from the A4 to the Q5 the first week of having the Q5 and notice a difference in sound quality. After a month, there was no difference.

We believe it to be well worth the money. The Sirius and iPod options sound "ok" on it, but where it really excels is with high quality music files on an SD card, or from a CD directly. I doubt you'll regret getting it.

tridentnyc

I agree with Urban here. At first I was very underwhelmed...UNTIL...I used the SD card slot with high quality mp3's...BIG difference. Because Audi uses a proprietary cable to connect the iPod to the MMI, the MMI pulls the audio from the iPod as analog, not digital and the sound quality from the cheap digital to analog converters in the iPod really hurt the sound quality.

If you're going to spring for the B&O I would avoid the iPod interface as the extra bucks spent will not be apparent listening to Sirius or the iPod.

One last thing. Oddly I feel like the subwoofer in the stock system is better for one important reason. In the B&O system you can't adjust the subwoofer level independently, it is only adjusted via the "bass" setting. In the stock system I believe the subwoofer level can be adjusted independently. Also, the sub in the B&O isn't that great, not very well defined.

johncaravello

folks who listen to mp3s either don't know what hi-fidelity sounds like or just don't care. CD's or better yet DVD-audio.

UrbanExtant

Or, maybe they are willing to compromise so they can have thousands of songs stashed on a one inch square device. At home, good old fashioned records are my favorite, then CDs, but I'm over the days of 400 CDs organized in books in the car taking up space, and, well, I've never known a car to have a record player in it, nor would I want to. So, for what the Q5 has in it, the SD cards win for sound (with high bitrate audio files), and for convenience. It's all about compromise, if you don't compromise, you end up with something like our craptastic current congress and house of representatives that can't do anything except say NO to the opposing party ;-)

gat821

No regrets on the B&O at all. Think it's much better than stock IMHO. Fantastic system!

Urban, we hear a bit of difference between the A4 and the Q5. The B&O in the Q5 has better separation, the bass a bit more solid, where the A4's bass is a bit muddier. The space and speaker placement is obviously different, but the system should be tuned to each car I assume. It's not a large difference, but it's there.

johncaravello

I agree with your statement but if someone is going to compromise with their medias source material then they might as well compromise in their playback equipment. As the saying goes "garbage in...garbage out". For folks that are only going to connect their "ipods" and worse yet try to do it through some type of streaming bluetooth connection(aftermarket eqmt), they might as well save their $850 and buy some cheap skull candy earbuds. As another saying goes, " an end result is only as good as its weakest link". It is shame that we Americans have become satisfied with inferior quality in many aspects of out lives for the sake of compromise.

JohnBoyToo

As long as we are on sayings

'pick your battles' comes to mind about what's important enough to spend your time on it --- and you know we are a 'now' generation !!!

it is just a car and car radio after all ...
and it's all relative