Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2023
Odds are if you're in the market for a Bang & Olufsen speaker, you already know a lot about it. Few people drop $4k on a speaker without doing a bit of research first. So, I'm not going to dive into the specs and details since there are other major reviewers who have already sorted that out, I'm sure. So I'll tell you about the experience of owning one.
First thoughts were "It's bigger than I imagined." It's not huge and unsightly by any means, but you'll definitely want a dedicated space for it. The build quality is, of course, fantastic. It's a work of art in itself. We love that you can customize the covers and legs, as well. We were also pleased to see there was a wall mount option for those who have limited floor space. Honestly, it looks nice enough, though, you probably won't mind making some room for it. I didn't care much for the panel covering the ports. Everything is dark in there. I felt like I needed a spotlight to see what I was doing. Fortunately, that stage is short lived.
Connectivity was fairly easy. Ours didn't come with a manual, unfortunately (I'm pretty sure it was a returned review unit) so we had to fend for ourselves. Downloaded the B&O application and plugged it in and it did most of the work for us, thankfully. We were able to connect easily to wifi and bluetooth as well.
We opted to test the speaker in two different locations: the living room and my downstairs office. We started with the living room. (For reference, our living room is large and shared with the kitchen with hard floors and a vaulted ceiling.) We calibrated the sound to the room (using the app) and got to listening.
Now, if you haven't heard audiophile quality speakers before (my wife hasn't) I can tell you this - it's an incredible experience. The sound is rich, full, wide open, and in short: glorious. My wife and I were nearly in a trance state the first 10 minutes. Over the course of two hours we threw every kind of music at it we had and it handled them all *perfectly* - of course we'd expect no less from B&O. I was even impressed at the stereo separation given the fact that it's a single unit. (There ARE multiple drivers on this.)
Vocals were beautiful and textured. Highs are crystal clear without being harsh, lows are fully supportive without muffling the mid range and highs. All the sound is perfectly balanced and in harmony, providing a listening experience that has to be heard to be believed. I hadn't listened to B&O in over a decade, so I had forgotten what I was missing. It truly has to be heard to be believed. My wife wept during some of the songs as she truly "heard" them for the first time.
Moving the speaker to my office, the experience was still excellent, but not as good as it was in the bigger room. This speaker is clearly happy with some room to breath. Everything still sounded crips and clear, though, and still as velvety textured as always. In this case, however, the sonic room mapping didn't seem to have quite as big a difference as it did in the living room.
In both the living room and my office it had plenty of volume to fill the rooms. I was pleased to see some sound customization options (including presets) in the app, and they worked as expected. Audiophiles probably won't care much for these settings, but I did enjoy tweaking things a bit for some music that was clearly recorded several decades ago and not up to current standards. (I'd love to see the ability to add these to the phone widget, as well.)
All this is pretty standard for B&O, though. So, let's talk about the functionality. Unfortunately, this is where we had to dock a star.
Overall, the setup, control, etc, was pretty dang good - as was expected. But it wasn't perfect. So let's talk about those cons.
The single biggest complaint I had with the device was that if you switch songs, the first second of the song is muted for some reason - so if you have a song where the first beat starts the instant the song starts playing you simply won't hear it. I was able to duplicate this via both AirPlay and Bluetooth. Very frustrating if you tend to pick different songs. It did better with playlists where music was played without interruption. Still, a scary oversight on a $4k speaker. - I was able to find a setting for "Fade In" that I turned off, but it seemed like it was tied to the Line In, so I'm not sure. It does seem to have helped, and I'll continue to test and update.
The on-speaker controls, while being very clever and well hidden are actually kinda clunky. You do everything via touching/swiping some raised capacitive dots on the back of the device. For starters, I got a static shock every time I walked across the room to change something. Dunno if it's the device or what, but I don't get those shocks from other devices. Aside from that, the controls just don't want to work great all the time. Sometimes if you want to turn the volume up a bit, you pause the music instead. Same for turning it down. Sometimes play/pause doesn't register at all. It's a clever idea marred by hit and miss performance.
The GOOD news is that since it's a wireless speaker, you probably won't be messing with the on-speaker controls much since you can do it all with your phone.
Now about that wireless... We run a mesh network which it detected and connected to easily. Signal was always solid and we never had any connectivity issues. What I have noticed (again on wifi and BT both) was that we'd get some crackling periodically in the first few seconds of a song. It didn't happen often, but it happened enough that I noticed. I can tend to forgive this since wireless is unpredictable to begin with, but it still was disappointing. Fortunately, we never experienced any disconnects or anything.
Well, let's wrap this up. My final thoughts are this. Overall, it's a beautiful speaker with incredible sound. It handles many types of music well and really creates moments when you want to just sit and listen to your music without anything else distracting you. Now when we have small moments of free time, my wife and I go listen to some music instead of finding a show. Yes, it's that good.
In short, we'd say the sound experience is certainly worth the price tag. However, we have trouble stomaching the issues we encountered for a device at this price point. Still, it's a wireless speaker, prone to all the wireless issues that exist with the medium, so we can forgive most of them. (Except cutting off the start of my music - that's insanity.) Still, for the experience you get just listening to this thing, we still think it's a wonderful device and are, overall, very happy with it.