Beolab History

Moving the amplifier closer to the speaker units

In an attempt to make a true high-performance speaker, engineers also wanted to reduce the distance from the amplifier to the driver units.

In those days an amplifier was a separate unit which had cables running from the speakers to its placement typically next to the radio. By placing the amplifier close to the driver units, the loss from the long cables was reduced. In Beolab Penta, the amplifier was placed at the foot of each column.

Become part of the furniture with a small footprint and a reflecting surface

Besides directing the sound towards the listener, the column design had another benefit. The footprint in the living room was relatively small. Also, by designing the speaker in a reflecting stainless-steel surface, it would take up colour from the surroundings and blend into the interior design. Designers Lone and Gideon Lindinger-Löwy were the masterminds behind this innovative design, which took the speaker away from the wall and into the room for the first time. Slim like a Giacometti sculpture and based on an acoustic line-source principle, the Penta had a particularly powerful bass without the boominess that plagued most other large loudspeakers due to the floor’s reflections.

Expensive but value for money

At the time, many Bang & Olufsen retailers thought Beolab Penta would never make it, the price tag was significant and the design was exceptionally bold. Time has of course proved them all wrong, and even today a lot of enthusiasts around the world refer to Beolab Penta as a major breakthrough product.

Column design became the new hit

The column design has become a signature design of many popular Bang & Olufsen speakers since then; Beolab 8000, Beolab 6000, Beolab 8002 and 6002, Beolab 1 and Beolab 18 – and today it is probably the most copied loudspeaker-design of all times.

The precondition for being able to pursue this design, was the development of new technologies for the fully active column speakers. Beolab 8000 was reincarnated in 2016 in Beolab 18 a seducing sound icon offering an Acoustic Lens, elegant wooden lamellas at the front, based on a new digital sound engine. It had a built-in wireless module so Beolab 18 could connect to any WiSA compliant transmitter, avoiding the need for speaker cables. Combining Beolab 18 with Beosound Core points towards the future of offering access to all streaming sources - be it Wi-Fi or Bluetooth based – in an iconic design that seems to last forever.

Insignificant look but significant impact

This was the essence of Beolab 6000. It came out as a result of an invention at the Dolby Laboratories in the US. After a study trip to the USA visiting the Dolby Laboratories, Boston Medialab, the Epcot centre, Hollywood and Lucasfilm, it was clear to the design team at Bang & Olufsen that multi-channel sound and home cinema solutions for the home would be the next big thing. Having as much as five speakers in your living room, however, was a significant pain point that needed to be solved. 

Using aluminium for speaker cabinets

The result became a thin high gloss polished aluminium tube with black fabric in front of the speaker being able to reflect the surroundings and, in this way, almost disappear in the interior. The use of aluminium for speaker cabinets has since then been applied in many other solutions. The benefit of being able to blend into the interior, being a robust, thin and rigid material, you can shape any way you like, has made aluminium quite a favourite material of both designers and acoustic engineers since then.

The loudspeaker construction is unique, as it is a combination of active and passive speaker units and it has been a crucial factor in achieving the compact design. The visual identity was inspired by a very successful and compact subwoofer, Beolab 2, launched a couple of years earlier, which truly showcased the driver units in a bold and novel way.

Beolab 3 included Acoustic Lens Technology, custom-designed ICEpower amplifiers and driver units and was able to adjusts its bass performance to the surroundings with a manual position switch – all learnings that came from studies for the cutting-edge acoustic technologies developed for Beolab 5 to provide superior performance.

Inside out design

The designer made a virtue out of the many technological innovations. Instead of hiding them in a cabinet, he left the drivers visible and designed a powerful and potent look that was a perfect match for the impressive performance.

With its compact design and a variety of stand options, placement on floor, in ceiling, on wall or on a counter top, Beolab 3 became the perfect solution in a surround sound setup – either on all positions or often as very discrete but great performing rear speaker. A cool and compact loudspeaker delivering an impressive sound performance with its power, precision and depth.

Performance over beauty turned into a Dalek

It was a speaker, where technology came first and where the designer, David Lewis, was invited to a listening test. His experience was described like this:

”Made of building bricks and lumps of wood and clay, it looked rather odd and disjointed. The shape was impossible to describe, too. However, during the listening test, I was struck by the fact that the sound reproduction was unobtrusive. My ambition was to come up with a design that emphasised the technology, and the challenge was to add a muscular bass-volume visually to such a gentle sound. By placing the bass unit at the base of the speaker and directing it downwards, the cone-shape emerged. The acoustic lenses in the upper half of the loudspeaker float on a string and add visual lightness despite the speaker’s 61 kg”.

Without David Lewis’ creative input and the freedom compact technology gave the engineers, the loudspeaker would have been the size of a typical cupboard.

According to the press that review Beolab 5 after that, his design gave connotations to the Daleks from the British science fiction series Dr Who.

A collection of technological innovations based on research studies

Beolab 5 showcased a lot of new technological inventions that the acoustic engineers had been working on for many years. In the early 1980s, Bang & Olufsen participated in the Archimedes research project, where it was found that the room layout and the placement of a loudspeaker greatly affects the listening experience. It was proven that floor and ceiling reflections were a major contributor to unwanted disturbances. In order to present the listener with a pure and natural sound, it was important to find a solution to these issues.

New approach to the sweet spot – for people with friends

Beolab 5 was the first product to introduce Acoustic Lens Technology (ALT) a unique design for the high and midrange drivers providing a 180-degree wide sound dispersion of the upper frequencies, and where disturbing reflections from the floor and ceiling were significantly reduced. The technology made it possible to achieve a great experience from several places in front of it. As the Tonmeister then put it: “This is a speaker for people with friends. Most high-end speakers play for one sweet spot and is for people with no friends”.

Identifying the room – the invention of ABC

In the high frequency areas, we found Acoustic Lens Technology to be of great use, but in the bass frequencies the problem was quite different. Bass sound waves are omni-directional, so you cannot really define where they are coming from. The room acoustics and the placement of the loudspeaker in it are important for the bass sound experience. To optimize bass performance, we needed to be able to control these elements, in any room, in any position. To do this Bang & Olufsen invented Adaptive Bass Control (ABC). It was a technology enabling the loudspeaker to examine the acoustic characteristics of the room in which it is placed, and determine its own position within this environment.

The speaker knows where it is in the room

Based on this information, Beolab 5 digitally calibrates itself to ensure the optimum bass reproduction for this specific placement. A moving microphone emerged underneath the 15-inch downwards firing bass unit, sent out a tone and measure what came back. In this way, you could place the speaker where you wanted in the room and let the ABC adjust its performance to this placement. The calibration process was activated by pushing an ‘invisible’ button at the top of the speaker. With its four ICEpower amplifiers producing 2500 watts per speaker the size of the room was no longer an issue - to prove this point, the launch was actually done in a concert hall.