Bang & Olufsen has relased the new Beosound Balance, a home speaker featuring a soft and rounded profile made from natural materials like solid oak and knitted textiles.

Bang & Olufsen has worked designer Benjamin Hubert and British industrial design studio LAYER to create the new speaker. The Beosound Balance has a solid-oak base that anchors the speaker and gives it heft, while the driver units are housed in a cylinder clad in a seamlessly knitted textile.

The speaker’s touch interface is invisible except when it’s being used. The interface features a proximity sensor that illuminates as soon as anyone approaches the Beosound Balance. The illumination uses light-trough aluminum technology and the speaker can be controlled by swiping around the top plate to control volume level. Touching the illuminated icons can change tracks, pause the music and even select favorite radio stations or playlists.

The Beosound Balance has seven drivers including two opposing woofers that generate a large bass sound and also cancel out vibrations. The omnidirectional mode of the speaker produces a uniform sound that radiates around the speaker, while the second sound mode delivers a more focused and ambient listening experience. These technologies have been taken from Bang & Olufsen’s flagship Beolab speakers.

When setting up a Beosound Balance for the first time, the user is guided by the speaker as it turns on the active room compensation technology that enables the speaker to analyze a room’s acoustic using a built-in microphone which creates a unique set of user-defined filters that can compensate for the individual sound reflections of a particular room.

The Beosound Balance supports Google Chromecast, Apple Airplay 2 and Spotify Connect. It also has support for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built-in.

The Beosound Balance will be available from March 5. The price will be €2,000 EUR / $2,250 and there’s a choice of Natural Oak and Black Oak finishes.

Features and specifications:

• Recommended Room Size: 10-60 m² 100-600 ft²
• Frequency Range: 33 - 23.000 Hz
• Speaker Drivers: 2 x 5,25” woofer drivers 2 x 3” full range drivers 2 x 2” full range drivers 1 x ¾” tweeter
• Active Room compensation: Yes
• Beam forming for directivity control
• Maximum Loudness: 104 dB SPL
• Automatic calibration through active room compensation when setting up the product
• Two Beosound Balance can be setup as a stereo pair using the Google Home App
• Bluetooth: version 5.0
• Wireless Connectivity: Wi-fi/WLAN 802.11 b/g/n/ac (2.4 GHz & 5 GHz), 2x2 MIMO
• Streaming services: Chromecast, Apple AirPlay 2, Bluetooth Streaming, QPlay 2.0, analogue line-in
  
• Remote Control: Bang & Olufsen App
• Dimensions: 20.1 cm (diameter) x 37.9 cm (height)
• Weight: 7.2 kg / 15.9 lbs