New at IFA 2018: The Bang & Olufsen BeoSound Edge.
Andrew Hoyle/CNET
Have you ever looked at that sorry speaker sitting on your desk and thought, “if only this thing were an enormous disc of doom?”
There’s a tweeter and a mid-range speaker on each side of the Edge’s interior, plus a 10-inch woofer bass driver.
Andrew Hoyle/CNET
You, my friend, are in luck — provided you have lots and lots of money, of course.
Your circular savior comes from Bang & Olufsen, and it’s called the BeoSound Edge. Roughly the size of a hula hoop, the Edge looks like a big honkin’ hockey puck with a slick aluminum rim (B&O tells us the design was actually inspired by a UK pound coin). Sit it on the floor or mount it to the wall and the Wi-Fi speaker will blast out high-fidelity audio from on demand from either side via Bluetooth, the built-in Chromecast streamer or Apple AirPlay 2.
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Inside, you’ll find a double dose of 3- to 4-inch tweeters and 4-inch mid-range speakers, plus a 10-inch woofer bass driver, all of which is designed to blast out your playlists in either direction. To crank the sound up, just gently roll the thing forward a few inches. A built-in gyroscope and accelerometer will translate that motion into an uptick in sound, while built-in springs will help gently guide it back to its centered position once you let go. To turn the sound down, just roll it the other way. And yep, that even works if it’s hanging on the wall — pull it down to lower the volume and it’ll bounce back up into position.
Crazy thing about Bang & Olufsen’s BeoSound Edge speaker — you adjust the volume by rocking it back and forth. There’s a gyroscope and accelerometer inside, plus springs to help it find its way back to center. #IFA2018 pic.twitter.com/rShI8AJTKh
— Ry Crist (@rycrist) August 29, 2018
In addition, the Edge features proximity sensors that can light up the controls as you approach, along with the ability to focus its sound in either direction using the Bang & Olufsen app. B&O showed this trick off at its IFA press conference and the effect was fairly striking. There was surprisingly little sound bleed on the muted side, even with the thing cranked up on the opposite side.
Whether that’s all insanely cool or just insane is up to you, but you can expect to spend an insane amount of money on the Edge when it arrives at the end of September. Specifically, the recommend asking price is set at $3,500, which is quite the uptick for the new tech. For comparison, the similar-looking B&O A9 debuted for £1,600 nearly six years ago, a price that converts to about $2,075 or AU$2,850.
Watch this: B&O’s new BeoSound Edge is a powerfully puckish AirPlay…
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