£1,750
bang-olufsen.com66 T3 AUGUST 2020
Te s te d
This smart speaker is packed
with ingenious tech, but is it
worth the high price?
B&O
Beosound
Balance
BALANCING ACT
eing Bang & Olufsen, the
Beosound Balance clearly
isn’t after the Echo Dot’s
end of the smart speaker
market; this aims to be the best smart
speaker for music out there. However,
the fact it costs not far off 10 times
what most of its rivals do means it will
have to gun very damn hard to justify
someone choosing it over them.
It probably won’t surprise you to
learn that the Beosound Balance
sounds fantastic. As you would hope
given the price, it is the best-
sounding smart speaker so far,
though not by much of a margin.
Before we discuss the sound in
detail, we need to say the audio profile
can be shifted pretty drastically. Not
only are there treble and bass
adjustment options and presets such as
‘Optimal, ‘Lounge’, ‘Speech’ and
‘Party’, there’s also the ability to tweak
these preferences from ‘Relaxed’ to
‘Energetic’, and also from ‘Bright’ to
‘Warm’. This means it’s possible to
heavily adjust the sound to your taste.B
Drivers 2 woofers, 4 full-range drivers, 1
tweeter Frequency range 26 - 23,000Hz
Connectivity main connection, line-in/
optical combi-jack, 2 x Ethernet, USB-C,
Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi 5, Chromecast,
Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect
Voice assis tant Google Assistant
Dimensions 200x380mm Weight 7. 2 k g