Company of the Year - B&O

B&O Beolab 18 Detail- Tweeter, Radiator Ellipse

Our company of the year award this year, goes to Bang & Olufsen, Denmark.

Point: They have had the best website.
Presently, AvantGarde gets that honour. No matter.

B&O produces the best home audio products, bar none.

Counter: However, when you first encounter them, and have an extreme interest in high-fidelity, you might not notice anything seeming interesting.

This is what it was like for us.

We admired the design of the BeoSound 9000 and BeoLab Penta, and could see use cases for both, however we could not understand why our good friend purchased a set of BeoLab 1's.

For us, they looked nice, cost a lot, and didn't sound that spectacular.

We thought conventional hi-fi speakers, like those of ProAc, plus electronics by Aragon or Bryston would yield better results. That was 15 years ago.

Now, ICE Class D amplification and B&O tweeter topologies have caught the automotive and hobbist hi-fi worlds by comparative-synapse. The Bang and Olufsen BeoLab 5 was the first B&O product that really caught our attention to their advance.

We were working at a New Media research institute, and tasked with finding a decent speaker. The BeoLab 5 was the only interesting contender. It offered built-in digital room correction (before the Veloydyne 1812), via an in-built "robotic" mic, control and power. What more could one wish for? It even looked vaguely Japanese, architecturally.

With trade-show environments being haphazard, why not simply throw 5's around the place at various volume levels, as talking points, and create a master mix to the various speaker locations in true New Media fashion.

BeoLab 19 - Subwoofer. Integrated.

Although our institute has Herman Miller chairs for every employee, HoneyBee-comb type cubicals, a full scale usability lab, SGI super-computer powered "BatCave" (4-wall), somehow the budget did not allow for our choice of loudspeaker. No matter. We plowed on with our MIDI-chat.

The BeoLab 18 and 19 are fully recommended as true HiFiArt.

At present, the BeoPlay A9 and Beolit 12 are recommended as purchase values.

In Vancouver, Bang & Olufsen may be purchased at www.commercialelectronics.com (B&O Store)

Bang and Olufsen may be contacted at:
www.bang-olufsen.com