B&O $6,600 Flagship WiSA Speaker Borrows Design From BeoLab 8000

Bang & Olufsen on Tuesday officially launched the BeoLab 17 compact speakers ($3,990 a pair) with Wireless Speaker and Audio (WiSA) capability it previewed at CEDIA Expo last month, along with the BeoLab 19 geometric subwoofer ($3,395) and flagship BeoLab 18 speakers ($6,590). BeoLab 18, designed after the company’s iconic BeoLab 8000 speaker that debuted in 1992, adds a slatted wood grill option ($1,390) that brings a mixed-material strategy to the line combining aluminum and wood, said CEO Tue Mantoni. The speakers, sub-branded Immaculate Wireless Sound, will ship at the end of November, Mantoni said.

The launch of the WiSA speaker line, being held simultaneously in Copenhagen and London, included a refresh of the company’s BeoVision 11 TV that now packs a WiSA transmitter. B&O will also sell an external transmitter ($525) to consumers who want wireless capabilities with B&O speakers without the company’s TV as the WiSA hub. Customers who purchased earlier versions of BeoVision TVs will be offered the transmitter for half price, David Zapfel, product manager for B&O North America, told us. Prices for the TVs haven’t changed with the addition of the WiSA transmitter, Zapfel said.

BeoLab 17, 18 and 19 are the first WiSA-certified speakers to come to market, following wireless Aperion Audio products that had been on the market before a certification program was in place. According to the standard, speakers can be up to 12 meters away from the WiSA transmitter, Zapfel said, emphasizing that the multi-speaker system is meant to be used as a one-room system for up to 7.1 channels of surround sound. But users can group multiple speakers in different configurations that are connected to a single hub, Zapfel demonstrated. In a home setting, an adjacent dining room with a pair of WiSA speakers mounted to the wall could be used in stereo mode when the home theater system isn’t playing, for instance. Up to nine “scenes” can be created for eight uncompressed audio channels and the scenes can be selected through the TV interface, Zapfel said.

An issue that has hampered the advance of wireless speakers has been synchronization of the signal reaching multiple speakers, Zapfel noted. And latency issues from dropouts can result in lip sync problems with video content, he said. B&O engineers have been working for the past two years with WiSA and Summit Semiconductor, which makes the WiSA chipset, to ensure “robust performance” and minimum latency, Zapfel said. “We have a fixed five-millisecond latency,” which is the time it takes a person’s voice to reach the ears of a listener five feet away, he said. “You'll never see a lip sync error on the TV with this technology,” he said. The speakers communicate in the 5.2-5.8 GHz range.

Metal, such as the aluminum enclosure used in the BeoLab 18 speakers, can impede wireless communications, so to overcome signal blocking engineers put in four antennas. Three are behind the wood grill in front and one in the back where the power cord connects to the speaker, Zapfel said. Regardless of a speaker’s location in a room, “you're going to have great reception” in relation to the wireless transmitter, he said. The speakers are designed to mount to a speaker stand or to a wall.

Zapfel demonstrated that speakers automatically “find” a transmitter within seconds of being plugged in, although measurements for distance from the transmitter need to be entered manually. WiSA technology has 24 radio bands to choose from if an audio signal encounters any interference, Zapfel noted. Speakers constantly have to monitor channels other than the ones they're communicating on to be able to jump to a new channel if they encounter interference, he said.

Several attendees at the event were confused by marketing images showing speakers in a lifestyle setting with no cords attached, while the speakers in the demo had power cords attached to electrical outlets in the room. That’s sure to be a confusing point to consumers, many of whom will assume “wireless” means no wires at all versus no speaker wires. Wireless speakers have to be connected to AC power, using an additional cord that doesn’t exist in the traditional passive loudspeaker world, which could easily mitigate the appeal of wireless speakers. And the length of the power cords on the B&O speakers isn’t conducive to the “flexible placement” that Zapfel referred to in the demo. The BeoLab 17 comes with a six-foot power cord and the 19 has a 10-foot cord, he said. “You need to have an outlet,” Zapfel acknowledged, “so if you're mounting [a speaker] on the wall that doesn’t take away the fact that an electrician needs to be there to put in an outlet."

B&O uses a trigger signal, rather than signal-sensing, for its external transmitter that works with third-party systems, Zapfel said. Installers can set the sensitivity for the speaker impedance and how long it takes for the speaker to time out when it doesn’t see a signal after a period of time. That allows an installer to customize the speaker shutoff for watching movies versus listening to music to save energy. “There might be a long pause in the surround channel, and you don’t want the speakers clicking off,” he said. It’s not unusual for there to be no signal in the surround channel for three minutes or longer, he said. For music, “why leave the speaker on any longer than you have to?” he said.

That additional installation requirement could appease some custom installers who have complained that the company is “trying to put us out of a job” by eliminating the wiring phase of an installation, said Zapfel, who has been training dealers on WiSA speaker installation. “I tell them, ‘You're going to be hanging more TVs and hanging more loudspeakers. You'll be avoiding the dirty work by not crawling through attics and fishing wires from the front of the room to the back of the room,'” he said.

B&O will roll out the wireless speakers exclusively in its 54 North American stores next month, including a new store in Coral Gables, Fla., set to open “any day now,” Zapfel said. At CEDIA Expo, the company courted installers as part of its B&O Professional Outreach partner program (CED Sept 27 p1) with large integration companies, “but we don’t have any of those guys operating yet,” he said. The company’s licensed retail stores have the option to work with an integrator where the company doesn’t have a store. The stores typically use certified installation partners that work with them exclusively or own a territory, he said.

B&O is under way with its store remodel initiative, Zean Nielsen, president, B&O America, told us. Across the U.S. it is upgrading the stores, either upgrading existing space or relocating to a “more prominent location,” he said. Model flagship stores were built as one-offs in Copenhagen and Shanghai as a kind of “Louis Vuitton meets custom electronics” approach, he said. “Our mission is not to have hundreds of stores,” Nielsen said. “We want the ones that we have to offer an amazing retail experience,” he said. The entry areas of the stores feature cash-and-carry products in a relaxed setting, while the back of the store, with an almost “hotel entrance” feel, includes swiveling walls and products on moving stands that bring the products to consumers being served cappuccino. Customers looking for a TV, for instance, “don’t move,” but are “swiveled toward that experience,” he said.

The rollout schedule includes two “full-blown” 2,000-square-foot flagship stores on the East Coast, with New York up first, Nielsen said. As B&O perfects the store concept and commercializes the store plan over the next six to eight months, it will open two flagship stores on the West Coast. Nielsen didn’t disclose locations due to ongoing dialogues with landlords, but if a current location has to be closed for a remodel, it would likely take two months, he said. An additional flagship store in Canada will follow, he said. The budget goal for the the flagship stores is $500,000, he said.

The next tier, the Concept Store, eliminates the “spinning wall” from the plan but keeps other elements and fixtures of the new store design, he said. The company will also have a store-within-a-store section in upscale department stores, he said. Nielsen cited Harrods in London and Bloomingdale’s in New York as the types of “very prominent” stores the company is looking at to house a store. The idea is to have a flagship store in major metropolitan areas in the U.S. such as New York, San Francisco and New York and then surround those stores “with smaller versions of it,” he said. Like Apple Stores, the B&O stores will promote the brand and have sections that provide access to the products, Nielsen said.

Smaller stores will promote the idea of more affordable B&O products such as the Play line, Nielsen said, to dispel the idea that B&O products are only available to affluent consumers. He cited the company’s sound docks and headphones that start at $199. The company divides its target customers into the 36-54-year-old and 36-and-under ranges. The older group wants products that are installed, he said, while the younger group is still “moving around” before they settle in. By the time the latter group reaches a higher income level, the hope is they will be loyal B&O customers, Nielsen said.