PREVIEW: B&O BEOLAB 90

Bang & Olufsen showed its monumental Beolab 90 loudspeakers at the Melbourne Audio & AV show, and Jez Ford dropped by the room for a serious listen…

One of the most striking demonstrations at the Australian Hi-Fi & AV Show was Bang & Olufsen’s room on the Lower Ground floor, in which they’d installed a pair of the remarkable new BeoLab 90 loudspeakers.

The Danish lifestyle leaders label their BeoLab 90 ‘The Intelligent Loudspeaker’, and indeed it would have to be darned intelligent to implement the algorithms required to distribute the incoming signals among the almost unbelievable number of Scan-Speak drivers adorning each cabinet—no fewer than 18 on each loudspeaker.

So facing front there is one front woofer of 260mm, three 86mm midrange units and three 30mm tweeters, with two more woofers of 210mm projecting from the sides to the front. Then at the rear there is another 210mm woofer, two more midrange drivers and two more tweeters, and finally a further midrange driver and tweeter on each side.

Each midrange driver and tweeter is driven by a 300-watt B&O’s ICEpower module (AM300X), while each woofer gets 1000-watts from a custom-designed Heliox AM10001 Class-D amplifier. Add all that up, and you’re listening to a total available power of 8,200-watts per loudspeaker.

Why the complexity and driver count? That’s where the ‘intelligent’ pitch comes in. As B&O’s Lars Fredsgård explained to us in the room at the show, the all-round complement of speakers allows the BeoLab 90 to deliver a variety of modes aiming for effective hi-fi performance irrespective of the speaker placement in the room, the room itself, or the listener’s position in that room.

‘Of course if we are installing these in the home of an audiophile, every effort is made to get the perfect positioning for critical listening,’ Lars told us. ‘But not every home

is like that, and then our Active Room Compensation (ARC) and the calibration that we carry out will still deliver amazing results in even difficult circumstances.’

The versatility comes from using some of the side- and rear-facing drivers in different degrees of anti-phase, aiming to overcome resonances in your room and unwanted boundary effects from your walls.

The BeoLab 90s do this in three different modes. ‘Narrow’ mode delivers the ultimate performance to the usual central sweet-spot— though the width of that sweet-spot can be tuned between a single seat position and a wider focus to allow several listeners to share the ‘zone’. Got a room full of people listening? Switch to ‘Wide’ mode and each BeoLab 90 will adjust its algorithms for ‘more social and passive listening situations’. This was demonstrated to us in the Show room and the result was significantly more energy in the room, more use of sidewall reflections. So it delivered a slightly warmer and less clinical sound than the ‘Narrow’ setting, but certainly a more equal distribution of sound through the room.

If it’s an actual party you want, the ‘Omni’ mode is your choice—the BeoLab 90s then radiate their sound in all directions equally… even backwards. We stood behind the speakers to hear the difference—very little sound there in ‘Narrow’ mode, but pushing out the energy when switched to ‘Omni’.

Does it actually switch off some drivers for ‘Narrow’ listening?

‘No’, Lars confirmed to us in Melbourne. ‘All the drivers are working all the time, in all three modes. But they’re doing different things depending on how you need the speakers to perform.’

The input section is versatile, with balanced and unbalanced analogue inputs, digital inputs, but also wireless options, using B&O’s own Wireless Power Link and WiSA technology. WiSA achieves impressively low latency (WiSA’s specs quote a mere 5-milliseconds), so that you could, for example, beam your audio straight from one of B&O’s upmarket televisions for a TV audio system that would be quite the soundbar-beater.

But of course B&O considers the BeoLab 90 to be their ultimate speaker for the discerning music-lover too, and at the Show the speakers were certainly demonstrating their ability to adapt to even difficult rooms, the Lower Ground Wool Suite having only hollow divider walls behind the speakers and little in the way of treatment to tame possible excesses of a sizeable rectangular room. In ‘Narrow’ mode their full frequency range was delivered along with exceptionally clear imaging, so that the show favourite Chris Jones’ No Sanctuary Here stood forward with palpable bass, zinging guitar and those deep support voices filling the room. The acoustic version of Radiohead’s Creep showed their emotive side, also their revealing nature— this recording gets a tad peaky at the vocal climaxes, and the B&Os didn’t overly tame this (which is a good thing in terms of audio honesty). Another show regular, The Kings Singers’ version of Billy Joel’s Always a Woman, was simply a delight to enjoy at the scale presented by the BeoLab 90s.

A show audition only, in a large untreated room, with one speaker ungrilled and one grilled (why do people demonstrate like that?) yet the BeoLab 90s’ abilities were clearly impressive, and those algorithms (which Lars Fredsgård informs us took the same three years to develop that was spent on the hardware) effective. As B&O itself says, these are clearly not speakers for everybody, but they may well be an extraordinary solution for just the right somebody. Jez Ford