AshK
Well it was as inevitable as the rising of the new day’s sun, so there’s no surprise on my part that one of the last holdouts has brought out an iPod speaker system. Not even Bang & Olufsen could resist the urge to get hundreds of millions of potential buyers to take a look at its products, in many cases buyers who never would have had B&O on their radar.
Being B&O, the BeoSound 8 iPod speaker system is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before. In fact it looks as if it came from the furthermost reaches of left field, but is no worse for it – certainly more appealing than yet another boring old iPod speaker. Designed by David Lewis, the BeoSound 8 supports everything from a Nano to an iPad and if this thing looks cool with an iPhone docked, it looks even better fielding an iPad. The remote is also not what you’d call conventional, being a palm sized silver disk that duplicates the simple front mounted controls.
The speakers are made up of a 5” mid/woofer backed by a 3/4” tweeter, driven by 70w and 35w of Class D power respectively and backed up with Digital Signal Processing. The quoted frequency range is 38Hz to 20kHz and while I don’t know that it will genuinely reach below 40Hz, the bass certainly impressed Steel, Pearce and myself as did the rest of the sonics.
More baby hi-fi than iPod speaker system, the BeoSound 8 can be wall mounted, has interchangeable grills and is available in black or white from early December at an RRP of $1925, which is:
a) when B&O first got started as a company and
b) sure to appeal to a whole new customer base (which is the point really)
I reckon a review unit would be a great idea, especially if I can keep it for a while but the B&O guys are expecting to run out of stock well before Christmas.
