Most speakers out tend to look pretty similar, but the Danish designers at Bang & Olufsen have something fuzzy for you to feast your eyes and ears on at IFA this year.
If you’re into fur and cotton and textiles and sound (oh my!), and you’re good for spending a little over a grand on a speaker this year, Bang & Olufsen’s “B&O Play” brand may have something worth looking at this year in its BeoPlay A6.
This gadget takes a rather unusual design and instead of looking like a conventional rectangular box speaker or even one of the more modern barrel sorts, B&O is doing things differently.
You’d expect that with Bang & Olufsen, and the company already has some unusual designs in its range, and the A6 is no different. As its designer Jakob Wagner says, it was designed more like furniture than a speaker.
“In a way I have designed BeoPlay A6 the same way I design a piece of furniture, however here form follows sound and interaction,” said Wagner. “Its intuitive yet surprising shape always ‘plays to you’ no matter where you are and generates a much more intimate relationship than you would normally get from a conventional music system.”
“BeoPlay A6 can blend in gracefully with almost any interior yet stand out with its distinct character,” he said. “No matter if you place it freely, in a corner or on the wall it will become the centre of social interaction like a contemporary jukebox.”
Inside the speaker, you’ll find five channels of sound with four speakers on the front and one driver on the back, with each speaker apparently running its own dedicated digital amplifier.
Multi-room support is also thrown in, allowing the BeoPlay A6 to talk to other B&O products relying on BeoLink Multiroom technology, while Bluetooth, DLNA, and AirPlay make up the other ways the A6 can talk to the world, or even just your ears.
And then there’s that fuzz, and that’s something Bang & Olufsen says has been made with one of the leading manufacturers of design textiles in Europe, Kvadrat. B&O suggests this provides “a strong, visual appearance” even if it feels like it might become the new target of your cat, making for a very loud and a potentially very expensive scratching post.
“BeoPlay A6 is an exciting new addition to the B&O Play line-up,” said Henrik Taudorf Lorenson, Vice President of B&O Play.
“We wanted to create a flexible and powerful music system tailored to the dynamic life of the modern music lover.”
While releases at IFA generally skip out on pricing and availability, for this one, you’ll get both, with the BeoPlay A6 due to arrive in Australian stores in October, priced from $1399.
