Ah, B&O. It’s all style over substance isn’t it? Posh externals stuffed with cheap components. You can buy far better for less money.
Well, that’s what some would have you believe and, the problem is that B&O sits out on it’s own and doesn’t really plough any common furrow. Yes, it all looks nice and design has always been a core philosophy behind the company’s products, but let’s remember that the company has always had serious technical abilities to back it up.
After all, they had one of the first commercially available linear tracking turntables, invented the HX Pro system for cassette recording and licensed it back to Dolby, the ‘Pramanik’ stylus profile is named after the engineer Subir Pramanik, who invented it whilst working for B&O and they had one of the largest largest loudspeaker design and development facilities in Europe in the 1970s. You think a fully integrated round-the-house audio and video system is a new development of the Alexa generation? Afraid not.B&O were doing it in the early 1980s.
In addition, they always offered starter ‘Audio’ ranges as well as the high end ‘Hi-Fi’ models. If your experience of B&O is the former then you might indeed wonder what all the fuss is about. Indeed, they haven’t always got it right, like many companies. For every Beogram 4000 there was a Beocenter 2200!
As to the components mentioned by the OP, I love the Beolab 3s. Yes, they’re small enough to sit on the palm of your hand and so have their limitations but I’ve watched audiophiles’ jaws drop when they listened to a pair behind a sonically transparent curtain and they were then revealed! Price depends on condition and colour (white and blue are rarer and so command higher prices, for example) but a good pair of the more regular colours on floor stands are worth £500-600. I don’t have a pair currently but they are definitely on my list.
The Beolab 2 is a different kettle of fish. It was B&O’s first subwoofer and, as far as I’m concerned, is a bloody awful thing. If you like your bass delivered in a series of huge monotonous thumps half a second or so behind the rest of the music then by all means grab it but, if not, give it a very wide berth. Then again, they’re still popular so if it’s cheap enough then grab that too and flog it on - going rate is anywhere between £300-600, although I have no idea why.
This should be fun, B&O fans make Linnies look casually disinterested.
No, we really don’t! Although, obviously if you keep saying stuff like that I will have to come round and give you a severe Chinese burn…
