B&O Beolab 20 Speaker Review

[TonyJZX]

i believe they were taken over in 2017... but my impression would be they have a long history of making expensive and innovative looking products that have middling performance long before 2017...

 

[LTig]

Not based on measurement. My ears are enjoying this kind of configuration better than the more expensive 3-way speakers from the same brand and type (Wharfedale EVO 4.1 vs 4.2).
As I said before: BECAUSE MONEY LIES

Is your preference for 2-ways based on just those two speaker models or did you audition others as well?

Actually I shared this view myself many years ago based on the opinion that for the same budget one would get better drivers and better x-over parts and this would result in better SQ. This might be true for low budgets but certainly not higher up.

 

[Hyponx]

Thanks @amirm for the review! I've been hoping to see more B&O appear here for a while.

I also own the Beolab 9's which are the non-DPS predecessor to this speaker.

A few thoughts:

Doesn't seem anyone mentioned these speakers have undefeatable loudness, it's a feature B&O calls ABL. Here's an article by the B&O tonmeister Geoff on that
https://www.tonmeister.ca/wordpress/2017/10/10/bo-tech-auto-loudness/. This may lead to the perception that the speaker is 'muddy' at lower listening levels because it is indeed boosting the bass significantly. There is also some inbuilt driver protection behavior.

I seem to recall Geoff also writing somewhere that more modern modelling and measurements led to the Beolab 50 tweeter wave guide being much much larger than the predecessor speakers.

The design is moderately older, launching in 2014. Per the spec page it is indeed 48khz/24bit output sample rate. To my knowledge it has not been updated at all aside from a status light color change at some point. In general B&O seems to be moving towards speakers with DSP'd multi-driver arrays these days.

B&O generally always provides installation of the product with purchase, that back panel to them is basically a service panel so probably not too surprising its pretty utilitarian.

It is hard to overstate how small this speaker is its interior volume is somewhere near the 30L mark. All it needs is a USB DAC and you have a full or near full range system with a pair.

Disappointed to see the tweeter dispersion is narrower than hoped for with its design. B&O has also not helped the perceived value of these either because their price has likely increased quite significantly since their launch like a lot of their other speaker. But on the used market some of these can still have decent value.

Cheers,

Hyponx

 

[Robbo99999]

A bit of a sham speaker this one, betrayed by it's very high price and promise of 20Hz bass! Unusable bass due to distortion and nothing special beyond that in any dimension. I gave this speaker a right panning in the vote.

 

[DSJR]

Finally some B&O speakers. I hope we‘ll see Beolab 50 and 90 measured as well at some point

if you do a search, the older Lab 6000's were measured domestically (with REW?), the results posted here and were surprisingly smooth if a little light in the bass as expected. These can be got for a very few hundred quid used (check the drover surrounds though for splitting - they are fixable however). There was a later version of these 6000 and pencil shaped 8000's with ICEPower amps and these fetch just under a grand used, but I've no idea how 'different' they sounded as in the earlier ones, the drivers limited the volume available I recall..

 

[sarumbear]

But as a hi-fi product, it doesn't fit the bill quite right.

B&O has always been a lifestyle product, not a Hi-Fi one. I’m glad that @amirm’s test proved that.

 

[Hart]

A $500 speaker in a $14,500 party frock

I have a friend who fell for these. They don't sound very good. For 15k you can get some amazing speakers, and a really great amp.

 

[Purité Audio]

B&O has always been a lifestyle product, not a Hi-Fi one. I’m glad that @amirm’s test proved that.

Well the 90’s are pretty decent, are there any measurements for the 50’s?

Keith

 

[sarumbear]

Well the 90’s are pretty decent, are there any measurements for the 50’s?

Keith

Any measurement for those 90s? Not to mention they cost $100,000.

 

[Bach]

This speaker seems to be from another planet!
So no surprise it sounds also!

 

[palm]

I think I went for active speakers in part after listening speakers such as their predecessors (Beolab 9). It’s clearly more mainstream today.

I was also really intrigued by the bass correction system of the Beolab 5 with their built-in microphone, and among the things I would like to try when I have some free time is the correlation between the response one can measure at listening position and what can be measured at the speaker location.

 

[Purité Audio]

Any measurement for those 90s? Not to mention they cost $100,000.

Stereophile’s

Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 90 loudspeaker Measurements

Sidebar 3: Measurements The BeoLab 90 is so massive that, rather than having it shipped to my home, I traveled to Kal Rubinson's place to take some measurements. I used SMUGSoftware's Fuzzmeasure 3 app running on my MacBook Pro, along with an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone and a FireWire-connected...

www.stereophile.com

Their own white paper too, can’t seem to find the link…
Keith

 

[fineMen]

The tweeter is as poor as I expected it to be. The geometry is too simple to actually work, Arguably it was a nice little coffee break idea that took up speed in the visual design team before the techs could deflate it. Just kidding.

What is actually an issue is the vertical directivity. The center to center distance of mid to high is, taking the 3kHz x-over into account way to great. Even if everthing else was good, that would kill it individually. It reminds me of the 1970s plasma tweeter that commanded similar design choice to no avail.

Uups, nearly forgot my personal point: why is it that people want the main speakers to radiate 'wide' to begin with? An appropriately designed mono center speaker could do better in this regard, leaving a lot more of design choices for the mains.

@amirm , that pattern in the 'nearfield' response, is it possible that it isn't due to resonance but interference instead? I argue that with 'nearfield' the wavelength must not exceed the active surfice's dimensions. And then there is always some residue from the other, still active speakers.

 

[HarmonicTHD]

Stereophile’s

Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 90 loudspeaker Measurements

Sidebar 3: Measurements The BeoLab 90 is so massive that, rather than having it shipped to my home, I traveled to Kal Rubinson's place to take some measurements. I used SMUGSoftware's Fuzzmeasure 3 app running on my MacBook Pro, along with an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone and a FireWire-connected...

www.stereophile.com

Their own white paper too, can’t seem to find the link…
Keith

Nothing to really write home about for 100k

 

[JDS]

This is a review and detailed measurements of Bang & Olufsen (B&O) Beolab 20 speaker. It was kindly drop shipped to me by a member and costs US $15,000.
View attachment 272656
You expect out of box industrial design from B&O and that is what they deliver. The Beolab 20 is an active, 3-way, sealed design. The woofer and mid-range are behind the cone cloth. The tweeter is unusual in the way it fires up into an acoustic lens of sorts:

View attachment 272657

The back side is made out of some kind of rubber (?) with a panel that removes to expose the inputs, power, etc.:
View attachment 272658

I was disappointed in the look, feel and component selections there. As you may be able to see, there is dust on the lower shelf. The RCA connectors are the ultra-cheap looking tin coated ones instead of gold. The dip switches work but again, don't give the feeling of luxury. On the positive from there is support for wireless streaming in the form of WISA (but sadly not bluetooth). And digital input. This requires synchronization between the two speaker which they are doing with a toslink out to the other speaker. And then you would need some kind of volume control.

The measurements you are about to see are generated by the Klippel Near-field Scanner (NFS). Critical measurements are made anechoic with others being in-room. Temperature of the measurement room was rather low at 57 degrees F. Reference axis was that of the tweeter. Speaker was tested with he switches as you see with the Free-space selection. Even though I have two speakers, listening tests per research was performed using a single one.

Beolab 20 Measurements
Let's start as usual with our anechoic, CEA-2034 standard compliant frequency response measurements:
View attachment 272659

Wow, I don't think I have measured a speaker that goes essentially flat down 20 Hz and especially one in this compact size! That is the good news. The bad news is that there is fair amount of variations, resonances and disturbances along the way. The plurality of these will make it difficult to develop an EQ for this speaker. We can see clues to some of these issues in our near-field measurements of each driver:
View attachment 272660

Note that I could not visually located the mid-range so that response may be approximate. But the woofer is not and we can see resonant peaks. The mid-range's upper spectrum also has a lot of ups and downs. And there is peaking in the tweeter as well. I am assuming DSP is used in this speaker. If so, surprising that they have not attempted to quell these variations with better crossovers and filtering.

Back to CEA-2034, here is our early window response which again, doesn't look all that nice:
View attachment 272661

So naturally our combined predicted in-room response has issues:
View attachment 272662

There is large variation in dispersion of the speaker:
View attachment 272663

I was surprised and disappointed to see the super narrowing of the tweeter response above 8 to 10 kHz.
View attachment 272664

Vertically we have a very messy situation:
View attachment 272665

So much going on outside of our solid areas indicating secondary diffraction and such.

Distortion is not bad at 86 dBSPL but gets worse at an odd position in response:
View attachment 272666
View attachment 272667

I looked at woofer response and it was not the cause of the peaking around 800 Hz. Instead, it seems to be the midrange that is complaining:
View attachment 272668

It is also responsible for multiple resonances up high which we saw in near-field response of the driver.

Waterfall display shows resonances:
View attachment 272669

Finally, here is the step response for fans of that measurement:
View attachment 272670


Beolab 20 Speaker Listening Tests
I placed the speaker as you see in the intro shot in my main listening room. I had just tested a $500 speaker with the famous Stevie Ray Vaughan track, the Tin Cup Alley. I expected it to sound even better on Beolab 20. Instead, I found the experience the other way around. It sounded dull and unexciting. So I skipped that and went to my standard reference tracks of female performances. Fidelity was improved here with a bit more bass presence that I typically hear from small speakers. As I progressed through tracks, I realized that the Beolab was activating my room mode at 105 Hz so started to EQ that and made more corrections after that:
View attachment 272671

As I noted in the review, building an EQ by eye is going to be difficult and it was. I *think* I made an improvement but I am not sure it translated across all tracks. The highs needed a boost so I put in the shelving filter initially at 2 dB but had to knock that down as it was a bit bright. A less lazy approach with multiple filters would have avoided that perhaps.

The initial filter set did not have that high-pass filter. I jumped into my tracks with sub-bass (< 30 Hz) content expecting great performance. The Beolab played this range but what I heard was quite distorted and odd sounding. The above filter reduced that some but what I was hearing was still abnormal and I preferred not having that sub-bass than what I heard. We see high distortion in bass frequencies in the measurements confirming what I was hearing.

On the positive front, high-pitch notes at times resonated around the room in a way I had not heard before. They would sparkle against different points in 3-D space which was a nice effect! So that tweeter design is doing something.

Overall, the response as I noted was variable. On some tracks such as Deadmou5, the speaker sounded wonderful. But on others as I noted, it was a let down. Maybe more work with positioning and filtering helps.

Conclusions
B&O is known for innovating in design department when it comes to looks of the products. At the same time, they have extensive engineering and research facilities. The latter gave me hope that they could tame the restrictions that the industrial imposes on design. Alas, it doesn't seem to be the case here. I think driving the speaker to have 20 Hz response but with distortion is unwise. There are a lot of resonances and interference patterns between the three drivers which I think could have been dealt with better. Clearly what we have is nicer than some just going for looks. But as a hi-fi product, it doesn't fit the bill quite right.

I am sad to not be able to recommend the B&O Beolab 20 speaker. Performance is too uneven given the very high cost.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

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I'm sure lots of people have been drawn in by the tweeter "lens" design, but it seems as harmful in practice as I would have guessed from its appearance: roughly half of the tweeter output is aimed at sharp corners in the aluminum hat, guaranteeing lots of diffraction. Some of the resulting spray will then bounce off the brim of the hat for still more diffraction. I'm actually surprised it tested as well as it did.

 

[Purité Audio]

Nothing to really write home about for 100k

I thought they were superb especially in narrow mode.
Keith

 

[amirm]

@amirm , that pattern in the 'nearfield' response, is it possible that it isn't due to resonance but interference instead? I argue that with 'nearfield' the wavelength must not exceed the active surfice's dimensions. And then there is always some residue from the other, still active speakers.

It could be. I couldn't identify the center of the woofer through the grill cloth.

 

[sarumbear]

I thought they were superb especially in narrow mode.
Keith

+/-10dB is superb?

Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 90 loudspeaker Measurements

Sidebar 3: Measurements The BeoLab 90 is so massive that, rather than having it shipped to my home, I traveled to Kal Rubinson's place to take some measurements. I used SMUGSoftware's Fuzzmeasure 3 app running on my MacBook Pro, along with an Earthworks QTC-40 microphone and a FireWire-connected...

www.stereophile.com

 

[Purité Audio]

I didn’t hear them in Kal’s room.
Keith

 

[375HP2482]

It's sometimes hard to distinguish scale online. Once we got a look at the naked beast it became apparent that the rather modest-sized woofer chamber will limit its low-frequency performance. Using/touting DSP to boost that 20 Hz region where the speaker's linearity suffers is a sin.