Bang & Olufsen

I’m torn with this review because the brand’s hardware design and sound quality are stellar. The initial app experience (when it works) also has a quality look and feel. However, they’ve leaned very heavily into recommending people use the app to manage their products (including software updates), so if there is an issue between the app and the speaker, you now have a very expensive piece of audio equipment that will be stale the moment the next software release is out. I tried to connect both the Explore and the A1 3rd Gen to the app. The former was seamless, the latter errors out. Of course, I can force a work around connection between my phone and the speakers by connecting directly to Bluetooth on my phone, but when your user guide has two steps dedicated to set up: 1. turn on device and 2. Use the app to connect, you would expect the experience to be seamless. Since the app really is not recognizing my A1, it won’t update the software - which is already out of date out of the box. In addition, their desktop utility meant to force a software update also does not work. I should mention this is my second A1 (they replaced the first one thinking it was a hardware issue) and their reps seem to be equally bewildered. Because the app worked perfectly for my Explore, it’s clear this is an issue with the App and the A1.

It has all of your basic needs, and even some more advanced tuning features if you really want to personalize the sound. All around, it’s everything I need. Worked well getting my Beosound Stage set up, tuning is fun, switches sound profiles very well based on input. There’s just a couple things that I wish could happen: When I airplay content, the album artwork doesn’t update with the song. It’ll display the same artwork for days at a time, then it’ll randomly update to something I’m playing, then get stuck there too. It’d be cool if this could get updated. This is more of a personal preference and wishful thinking, but I wish loudness was a toggle within the sound profiles rather than the separate sound setting tab. I honestly wish they weren’t separate and I could tune treble, bass, and loudness for each of the profiles instead of an overall blanket setting.

This is perhaps a classical example of out-of-mind design. Either software or hardwire. It needs a miracle to have the product set up done and if you are lucky, you might be able to find any meaningful help from the manufactures explanations, which seems to be for the purpose of testing the intelligence of the users. And the designer deliberately chooses to arrange the function bay at the bottom of the product in the back - without lying done the entire speaker you would be able to either see or guess where all the jacks or plugs are. And even you lay done the speaker you still need high IQ to figure out where, what, and why the designers were so determined to make virtually each plug and jack in the most possible inconvenient spot/angle. And worse, once you lay done the speaker, the surface cover cloth is (deliberately designed) to come off and after that, well, you need at least two more hands to have it fixed (if you were lucky enough and patient enough). Simply put, it is so amazing that the designers were so successful to make the product a wonderful dumb challenge to anyone who wants to use it.After all the above, the sound quality is indeed very good. However, buying such a classical anti-human product for over 3000 dollars was absolutely the most stupid commitment that I have ever made, especially compared to many better pursuits that offer much compatible effects with a fractional price of the A9. If there were one sentence to describe this product, it would be “the dumbest design that I have ever seen”.