Leave it to Bang & Olufsen to create an upright, full-sized, room-filling speaker that doesn’t make it look like Foreigner is about to play a set in your living room. Like everything in their lineup, the B&O Beoplay A9 Design Speaker is high-tech audio encased in a form that looks more like sculpture than consumer product.
It’s a sort of timeless design that looks like you maybe inherited it from the mid-century-modern collection of a very stylish relative. But the guts are all very of-the-moment, with built-in connectivity to other Beoplay speakers via Chromecast or Airplay. Google Assistant comes preloaded.
Standing just shy of three feet tall, the A9 stands on three hardwood legs with one slim (color-matched) power cable extending from the back. Connectivity through wi-fi, bluetooth, or line-in jacks lets you play whatever you want, be it Spotify, Apple Music, or some good old fashioned LPs.
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