Bang & Olufsen Beosound A9 (5th Generation) - Iconic And Powerful Multiroom Wifi And Bluetooth Home
Bang & Olufsen Beosound A9 (5th Generation) - Iconic and Powerful Multiroom WiFi and Bluetooth Home Speaker with Active Room Compensation, Black Anthracite
- POWERFUL ROOM-FILLING SOUND: music to fill your living space thanks to its seven effective drivers
- ACTIVE ROOM COMPENSATION: Beosound A9 scans the room around it to optimize the sound according to its placement
- POWERFUL STREAMING PLATFORM: a fast, easy setup, and a streaming powerhouse ready for future upgrades and software updates
- ICONIC DESIGN, RICH EXPRESSIVE SOUND: a speaker that’s as good to look at as it is to listen to
- BANG & OLUFSEN APP: Customise settings, choose your favourite sound profile, set up timers and alarms, and much more, with the Bang & Olufsen app.
- CONNECT YOUR SPEAKERS: Connect multiple Bang & Olufsen speakers and stream music to them with Beolink Multiroom, AirPlay 2 and more.
Brand : Bang & Olufsen
Category : Electronics,Portable Audio & Video,Portable Speakers & Docks,Portable Bluetooth Speakers
Rating : 4.5
Price : US $3699
Review Count : 4
SalesRank : 0
Bang & Olufsen Beosound A9 (5th Generation) - Iconic and Powerful Multiroom WiFi and Bluetooth Home Speaker with Active Room Compensation, Black Anthracite
- Alright, first thing\'s first. If you\'re in the market for a Bang & Olufsen because either money is no object, you have a very high budget, or you have aesthetic and decorative concerns. If you are looking for the highest possible sound quality, with no other concerns, you might consider another option to save money. This high price tag isn\'t going toward all sound quality. (Though it certainly isn\'t lacking. More on that in a moment.)Without dragging it out, what are you getting that is unique to the Beosound A9?Beautiful design. This is a unique, and absolutely stunning design. You could put this in any room, and unless you point out that it\'s a speaker, the average person won\'t even recognize it without prompting. I tested this with guests. Even with pointing to the room, it took a minute to find the speaker. If you\'re butting heads with a spouse because you want a gaudy, powerful speaker, and they want something subtle, well... this may just be your middle ground.Build quality. The first thing I noticed when I opened the box was that 5-letter country of manufacture. China? Nope. Czech. This looks, and feels, like the sky was the limit on built quality. Everything about it screams TOTL with look and feel. Even sliding your fingers across the metal feels smooth and flawless. It\'s the luxury car of speakers. Build quality matters. I\'m not in the least bit concerned about physical driver or frame failures.Sound quality. Okay, I mentioned earlier that you could spend your money more efficiently if you only care about sound quality. You could get a pair of high-quality tower/floor speakers from reputable brands for half this price. However, I can tell you that these sound about as good as most people could ever tell or would ever need. The bass is almost shockingly deep and rumbly, reaching all but the very lowest registers. I mean 20hz and under. A depth most people will not care about, and very few speakers could ever reach without the help of a subwoofer. Super punchy, and very responsive to the app\'s EQ. Midrange and treble require no adjustment at all. IF you did decide to adjust the treble, you could. You have quite a broad sweep for both bass and treble in the B&O app. Truly awesome sound quality.And that\'s with Bluetooth. Which, incidentally, is also the reason for that 1-star deduction.Bluetooth. I considered requesting a replacement for this reason. Still am, actually. However, I\'ve come to the conclusion that this is probably just a shortcoming of these units. One I hope is fixed with firmware. IF, or WHEN you get a stable connection without all the wackiness, it sounds amazing. As good of a Bluetooth connection as you can hope for. However, here\'s what usually happens: First of all, some devices are requiring me to completely delete and pair again EVERY time I want to listen to the speaker. It\'ll connect, then disconnect, repeatedly until I completely redo the pairing process. For other devices, like my phone, it will reconnect, but even with the app open I get crazy volume fluctuations. Even when I set the volume default in the app. It seems to totally ignore it and roll a digital dice instead. Sometimes I\'ll hit play and it\'ll blow the windows out. I\'ll scramble to turn it down before my eardrums melt. Other times, I\'ll question if it\'s even connected, only to realize the volume is so low I literally can\'t hear it (even with my phone at 50%). I\'ll have to get up, walk over to it, and manually turn up the volume. For this price tag, this is hard to swallow. I\'m giving B&O the benefit of the doubt that this\'ll be fixed. Also, once a good connection is established the volume is tuned, you are ready to sit back and enjoy one of the best listening experiences of your life.Should you buy the B&O Beosound A9?Yes... maybe. If one of the first few factors I mentioned are among your primary concerns, this is a stellar option. Possibly a TOTL option for you. It\'s built like a luxury tank, looks absolutely beautiful and modern, and sounds quite good. Sound your -only- concern? You could do better for the price.For the right person, in the right home, under the right circumstance? Highly recommended.
- 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.
- This is absolutely the best speaker I\'ve ever owned, and probably will ever own. Easy to set up, blue-tooth operation. The sound is absolutely incredible. I was a bit concerned with it being one speaker that I wouldn\'t get true stereo sound, but that isn\'t the case at all. The B and O app actually has the speaker \"scan\" the room and adjusts the sound accordingly. I am hearing the little sounds in songs that you don\'t typically hear unless you\'re wearing high-end headphones. You would swear that you have 6 speakers spread throughout the room,...the speaker is across an almost 30\' long room and I can hear sounds that come from behind me, in front of me, on both sides of me....I now know what \"surround sound\" should be, and to have it come from one source sitting in the corner of my room is astounding to me.It\'s fairly large at about 2\' round, but flat enough that it isn\'t intrusive . It\'s obvious quality, from the weight to the aesthetic. The linen-look fabric covering is attrative and there are covers you can order (including art) to tie in with your room. I have the gray fabric one, and it\'s fine in my decor. It\'s not overly complicated to operate. Plug it in, download the app and operation was practically automatic as long as you know your wifi password.The only thing I could think of for improvement would be to have it receive my Amazon music. Perhaps it would connect if I paid for the music, but it will not broadcast. Spotify works great with it, however., and from my understanding, it will pair with Chromecast or Apple Music.Before getting this item I would have never spent this kind of money on audio equipment, but this may have turned me into a bit of an Audiophile. Simply excellent.
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