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Bang & Olufsen's Perfectly Round Speaker, Yea or Nay?
IMO this model feels over-aestheticised for an audio product - an uninformed individual might have no real clue what it does if they encountered in out of context. That being said, B+O makes some very high quality products and remains unafraid to take risks which I applaud them for. I've used a Beoplay A9 in person and found it to be an excellent balance between being a soundsystem and a piece of furniture:
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yay, physical controls like this should be embraced more. but you won't see me buying one at that price.
I own a Beocenter 7700 with a pair of Beovox S45s and they sound effing awesome. B&O takes risks to produce gorgeous hifi equipment that is anything but ordinary. Is their stuff overpriced, and often proprietary and weird? Yup. But that's what makes it kind of cool.
As for not mounting the speaker flat against the wall, it probably has some ports on the back. If you mounted it flat the sound quality would suffer.
Nay. Are B&O the Dyson airmultipliers of sound?
Unfortunately their products just don't tend to sound that good... so what you are paying for is typically a wacky, hard to execute design. The question is do you want an 18" aluminum circle hanging off your wall that everyone will ask "what is that" to which you get to say "a really expensive speaker that doesn't sound that good..." . I'm biased obviously, but I demo their top of the line 2 channel tower speakers a couple of years ago and even though they had all of this directional tech I thought they sounded very muddy. With a good pair of speakers you should be able to play a stereo recording and get a very clear distinction between all of the instruments in the recording as well as a sense of where the musicians are in space based on how the track was mixed (especially if you are paying thousands of dollars for a speaker) and these just didn't have any of that.