And by high end, we also mean very, very expensive
Bang & Olufsen has taken the covers off the Beosound Balance; a super high-end smart speaker that is all set to give your bank balance a right hammering.
Costing £1,750, the AirPlay 2 enabled speaker, which also has the Google Assistant baked in, is first and foremost an audiophile-grade bookshelf speaker, with the smarts very much on board to complement the acoustics.
On the sound quality front, that solid oak base houses a pair of 5.25-inch bass drivers, which teams up with two 3-inch full range drivers, two 2-inch full range drivers and a 0.75-inch tweeter for a maximum 104 dB SPL volume.
B&O tells us that, thanks to the “Active Room Compensation” capabilities (think Sonos Trueplay or the HomePod’s reposition sound adjustment), you’ll get “carefully controlled beams of sound for a clear acoustic experience from the front and rich sound enhancement at the back“.
The design, which the speaker specialist worked with Benjamin Hubert of Layer Design on, includes a precision-crafted aluminium grill with a Fibonacci pattern and that touch panel up top, which is described as “light-through-aluminium” disappears when it senses nobody is around and about to touch it.
As well as having the Google Home voice command option, the Balance can also be used as a regular Bluetooth speaker or as a Chromecast Audio device. If you don’t want the Big G’s servers listening in, you do have the option of turning of the microphone.
The Beosound Balance is on sale now, for £1,750 and comes in natural oak (the light one) or dark oak (the darker one). It can also be teamed up for multiroom audio with B&O’s other connected speakers.
The good news, if you’re firmly in camp-Amazon, is that Alexa will be an option for the voice capabilities later in this year; and Spotify Connect should be an option too at some point.