This is a myth.
Unless you wish to consider the manufacturers of almost every hifi system to be made up of Phillips parts.
Sadly, the cost of B&O on EBAY is not all that cheap either, for Hifi that is getting on for 30 years old - and it is worth comparing the cost of it to all the other stuff that was on the market at the time - actually you don’t see much becuase most of it is worthless. Check out how much JVC is on there, or maybe Sanyo, then compare the prices.
You need to remember that the patents and standards for the cassette and the audio CD and most of the VHS and betamax recorders are all owned by Phillips, and that anything using these as major parts of their systems either uses Phillips components directly, or pays a royalty - all of them without any exceptions whatsover.
Since I own and have repaired many hifi systems, and I am very well aware of the manufacturers of the components from which they are made, your statement ** Ralph** is an extreme exagerration of the truth.
Care to apply that statement to SONY, BOSE, Yamaha, Akai, Sansui and just about every other manufacturer, because it is as true for them as for B & O.
Are we also going to say that all these manufactuers were just rebadged Siemens products, because gues who made many of the semi-conductors for them?
I’ll even mention a specific component for you, the earlier laser head mechanism the CD 104 was a Phillips produced part, however it was used by many other companies.
Its almost like saying that the Land Rover is a Buick since it used the Buick engine on license, even though it was used in a modified form, yet no-one would truly decribe Land rovers as Buicks.
To link B&O to Phillips is to attempt to do something very similar.
Even so, even if it were rebadged Phillips, what is does reveal is the sneering contempt held by so-called ‘experts’ in audio engineering who have never taken the real trouble to attend high level college or university courses and do the hard work to understand the design, construction and the real meanings of specifications.If Phillips sounds good, then it sounds good, the badge is completely irrelevant. Sneer on dude!
What has always mattered is the sound quality that can be objectively measured, not opinionised. Hifi buffs are self educated idiots with lots of prejudices and no formal technical knowledge - they are wannabee technicians who can’t actually cut it when it comes down to the maths. They speak with an authority that conceals their ignorance.
This, as you have probably guessed, is one of my pet peeves. I hate the approach of the ‘faux engineer’ because it is unscientific, because it is the easy way out of doing the hard graft it takes to understand a complex subject. Its the sort of lax thinking that leads to the conspiracy theorist, to the fools thinking that sitting in their homes and looking at a few charts and images, they can debunk the idea that we went to the moon, or a host of other stupid pseudoscience trends.
Knowledge is hard won, it is far easier to have a little bit of stolen glory by pretending to know something, by repeating some canard that has been smokescreened in some meaningless pseudo-gobbledygook. The hifi world is awash with such people.
B&O stuff was expensive, and still is, you can get more for your money over the shorter term, but other stuff tends not to last as long or hold its value as long and also other stuff soon looks old.
Even so there is some better sounding stuff out there, plenty of it - but the stuff that sounds better and lasts as long also holds its value too, you just look up some of the Audio Fidelity stuff, or Quad, or NAIM - in fact this is likely to be even more expensive than B&O - but at least is can measure objectively why it is better with the right equipment - it is not a matter of opinion.