Bang & Olufsen is no stranger to crafting stylish and wallet–breaking gadgets. Well, the Danish company is at it again with this…lampy looking speaker, the Beosound Balance. It’s designed in conjunction with Layer, a London-based design agency, and costs $2,250. Also, it looks like the base for an artsy lamp.
The Beosound Balance is divided into two parts and contains a total of seven drivers, include two opposing woofers that Bang & Olufsen says “generates a powerful bass” with vibration canceling. According to Engadget, the bottom half has one upward-facing subwoofer that gets filtered through a perforated metal dish. The top half, meanwhile, houses a downward-firing bass driver, three mid-range speakers, and two tweeters. The base is solid oak, while the upper half is wrapped in a knitted textile and also doubles as a hidden, touch-sensitive control.
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The speaker also sports two modes—an “omnidirectional mode” for 360-degree listening, and a “sound mode” for what Bang & Olufsen dubs a “precisely-focused ambient sound experience.” Like other premium speakers, the Beosound Balance also says it can analyze your room via internal microphones to optimize sound in a particular space. For extras, the speaker supports Google Chromecast, Apple Airplay 2, Spotify Connect and comes with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built-in.
Based on the specs, the Beosound Balance has a lot of the things you’d expect from a connected speaker. It’s hard to judge it without actually listening and testing to the thing, but Bang & Olufsen is known for making some quality speakers. Only the company is also going hard with the Beosound Balance’s design. In its press release, the company describes this thing as a “Powerful and Poetic Home speaker.” It waxes lyrical on how it uses materials to “soften technology” and is so gorgeous that it could “double as a sculpture.” Layer, the design firm behind it, describes it as having a “distinctive, sculptural silhouette and rich material palette” before dubbing it an “objet d’art” for the home.
Bang & Olufsen says the design is meant to help the speaker blend into home interiors—which is a thing Ultimate Ears also said about its recent home speaker, the Hyperboom. The Beosound Balance probably is closer to that mark, in that it kind of doesn’t look like a speaker.
Okay, but it also kinda looks like the base of an IKEA lamp, right? Not in a bad way! I like IKEA lamps! It’s just maybe, for that price, I want a poetic speaker to look…less lamp like? No? Just me? Or maybe the fact that it looks like a lamp base means it’s succeeded in blending in. I don’t know.
In any case, the speaker is available starting today from Bang & Olufsen’s website and third-party retailers. The lamp—cough, speaker, cough—comes in two colors: Natural Oak and Black Oak.
