Ears-on: B&O's new Beolit 12 AirPlay speaker
Crave Asia goes hands on with the first product in Bang & Olufsen's new Play line of affordable home entertainment products. See how the Beolit 12 AirPlay speakers stack up.
Soren Kokholm , general manager of B&O Singapore, highlights the sturdy leather strap of the Beolit 12.
(Credit: Timothy Fernandez/CNET Asia)You know you're an audio geek when you're most interested in the bit of the product demo where you get to hear how it sounds. Well, after about 10 minutes of listening time with the Beolit 12, a new AirPlay-compatible speaker launched under the Danish company's new B&O Play line, we have to say we were impressed.
Listening to a couple of tracks of our own over the 3.5mm stereo minijack (the Bang & Olufsen store we were in was afraid of us hogging Wi-Fi bandwidth for AirPlay), we have to say that this little speaker sounds promising. Bass was deep and taut, while vocals had a good presence. Treble was also nicely handled without being harsh. One track we tried, "American Baby" by The Dave Matthews Band, sounded quite detailed, even though it was just a 192kbps constant-bitrate MP3 ripped from a CD.
A look at the rubberized top panel of the speaker and backlit touch-sensitive buttons.
(Credit: Timothy Fernandez/CNET Asia)B&O's first AirPlay speaker will sell for $799 in the U.S. Like all B&O products, we weren't expecting an amazing price-to-performance ratio, but we felt that this boxy speaker at least made a good first impression--we began drawing some comparisons with much larger speakers such as the B&W Zeppelin Air and Bose SoundDock 10, which says a lot.
We hooked up our iPhone 4 via the 3.5mm audio jack.
(Credit: Timothy Fernandez/CNET Asia)The Beolit 12 is available now. Do look out for our review in the coming weeks.
(Source: Crave Asia)
