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Bang & Olufsen celebrates their 90th anniversary with a $120,000 speaker

By Marcus Wong - on 18 Nov 2015, 2:03pm

Bang & Olufsen celebrates their 90th anniversary with a $120,000 speaker

90 years in any industry is certainly a worthy achievement, and Bang & Olufsen have decided to mark theirs in style – with the launch of their most advanced speaker ever, the BeoLab 90 loudspeaker.

To say the BeoLab 90 is a floor-standing speaker is a bit of an understatement. The BeoLab 90 is every much design centerpiece for your home as it is a sophisticated work of audio engineering. Each BeoLab 90 has 18 dedicated speaker drivers: seven 30mm Scan-Speak Illuminator tweeters, seven 86mm Scan-Speak Illuminator midrange drivers, three 212mm Scan-Speak Discovery woofers, and a 260mm Scan-Speak Revelator front woofer.

Beam Width Control

Each speaker has 18 dedicated speaker drivers.

Every driver is powered by an individual amplifier that was custom designed for the BeoLab 90, and the entire set has an integrated Digital Signal Processor that samples at a fixed rate of 192kHz. What’s interesting is also the fact that the BeoLab 90 features what they call Beam Width Control which essentially allows you to adjust the width of the sweet spot of the speakers.

There are three beam widths to choose from: narrow, wide and omni. The narrow (approx.. ±45-degree) beam width is optimised for a “sweet spot” listening experience when you are seated directly in front of the two speakers. For sharing the listening experience with family or friends, the beam can be set wider (±90-degree) or to the omni (360-degree) setting, which spreads the sound experience to cover the entire room.

Beam direction control

An LED under the plate indicates the direction of the sound beam.

The BeoLab 90 has the ability to switch the direction of the sound beam in five directions, allowing you to control where exactly the sound falls. It does this by way of an aluminum top plate that is turned in a whirlpool rotation. A hairline thin LED emits light below the plate to indicate the direction of the sound beam, and you can adjust this via a dedicated app on your smartphone. The app also gives you the option of creating and selecting different listening presets so you can quickly adjust settings based on the situation.

Changes in speaker location or the interior design of an area can greatly affect the acoustics of a room, so there’s a measurement microphone included with every set. This allows you to precisely calibrate the speakers to your room so you can get optimal performance as often as you want.

Thermal protection

Each BeoLab 90 contains 45 temperature sensors which report the current temperatures of various components within the loudspeaker back to its DSP. The information is then used in conjunction with the output power of the amplifiers to calculate the temperature of other related components like the driver voice coils, and compared against their thermal limits.

If any single component nears its thermal limits, the loudspeaker makes and automatic decisions to prevent failure, so the level of a particular driver will be reduced until it has cooled enough for nominal operation. This helps to prevent failure from overheating, but also helps to keep the frequency response consistent by offsetting the output to compensate for change.

Connectivity

The BeoLab 90s are interconnected via Digital Power Link in a master-slave configuration with audio sources being fed into the system via the master speaker’s connection panel. Music systems, TVs, PCs or AVRs can be connected via Analogue Power Link, RCA or XLR or the digital S/PDIF, TOSLINK or USB-Audio connection, and there is also a wireless option. The BeoLab 90 incorporates wireless technology using multichannel digital audio streaming (based on the WiSA technology).

Here’s a list of inputs available:

Inputs:

Analogue (Master loudspeaker):

  • Power Link
  • RCA
  • XLR (fully balanced)

Digital:

  • USB Audio (24 bit/192 kHz)
  • S/P-DIF (24 bit/192 kHz)
  • TOSLINK (24 bit/96 kHz)

Digital: (Master and slave loudspeaker)

  • Digital Power Link (24 bit/192 kHz)

Wireless:

  • Wireless Power Link (24 bit/48 kHz)
  • WiSA (24 bit/96 kHz)
     

The BeoLab 90 is available from January 2016 and will be on sale exclusively at Bang & Olufsen Grand Hyatt Showroom. BeoLab 90 is retailing at SGD $120,000 for a pair.

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