Bose 700 Soundbar Won't Connect With Akai Professional BT500

[JMerg]

I recently purchased the Bose 700 Soundbar and have not been able to connect via bluetooth my Akai Professional BT500 vinyl player. In doing research, I saw some suggestions that the only way to connect to the 700 Soundbar via bluetooth is with a device that has a screen, but surely this can't be the case for an $800 speaker.

How can I connect the vinyl player?

[Tony_A]

Hi JMerg

Thanks for writing in and sorry to hear about the Bluetooth issues!

• It sounds like the soundbar is connecting to other mobile devices correctly?  
• All of our Bluetooth speakers once put into pairing mode should be able to connect to any A2DP Bluetooth source.  This would be dependent on the source device to make the attempt at connecting to the soundbar.
• If this doesn't work, you can always use an analog to digital optical converter to hardwire it to the soundbar as well.

Warm Regards,

Tony A - Community Support 

[CaptainCurtis]

I have this exact issue on the Akai Pro BT500 with my Bose SB500.

Hugely frustrating for such a high end piece of kit - my £150 Samsung soundbar had no issues connecting whatsoever, it was replaced with this and yes, the sound is far superior but not being able to listen to my vinyl is a real dissapointment. I’ve read about this issue multiple times on these and other forums, I’m sure this could be fixed with a small firmware update, could the dev’s take a look at this for us?

For now, looks like I’m going to have to buy an analog-digital converter and plug in that way, as suggested here, not ideal, and not sure how it’s going to work when I’m plugged into my TV via HDMI already, but we’ll see, probably another expensive bodge.

[CaptainCurtis]

I just thought I’d update as I’ve found myself a few months later looking for an update on this. As I sit listening to vinyl on a Saturday morning!

I brought the converter, about £20 on eBay so I go out of the phono, convert to digital signal then into the digital in, it works, sound is OK too however it’s not without its faults.

As my TV is plugged into the soundbar via ARC for some reason (again probabaly software related) the digital channel doesn’t work without the TV being turned on whilst the HDMI is plugged in, essentially it thinks the digital signal is coming from a TV and so turns my TV on. I can unplug the TV HDMI to turn it off, but yeah, as suspected, a bit of a bodge when I spent all this money on high end equipment for a nice, neat, seamless sound experience in my living area.

A response of some sort from Bose would be much appreciated, even if you’re not fixing it, an acknowledgement wouldn’t go unappreciated!!!

[Liam_W]

Hello @CaptainCurtis,

Thank you for following up on this!

I'm glad to hear that you're enjoying your vinyls this weekend, and that you were able to find a solution, as faulty as it currently appears.

In this instance, The Soundbar 500 and the Soundbar 700 are set up in such a way that means there is only 1 input for hard cable, as this is designed for usage with a TV.

For example, a TV would either be connected via the optical cable, or via the HDMI ARC cable.

As you are trying to use 2 different sources from each of these cables, which the Soundbar is trying to play as one, this is why the system requires the TV to be on in this setup.

As you observed, when the HDMI ARC is disconnected, the Soundbar will no longer consider this the source, and will solely play from your vinyl player.

As for the Bluetooth side of this, have you checked that both the Soundbar and the vinyl player are both in Bluetooth pairing mode before trying to pair these? Pairing mode for the Soundbars can be achieved by holding down the Bluetooth button for 10 seconds to clear the Bluetooth pair list and place this into a "Ready to Pair" mode.

If you are able to get this to work with Bluetooth, the system views this as a separate source, so you would not have the issue you're having with the TV.

I hope this helps!

If I can be of any further assistance, please let me know!

Liam

Community Support