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B&O Beolab 20 Speaker Review

Rate this speaker:

  • 1. Poor (headless panther)

    Votes: 133 47.8%
  • 2. Not terrible (postman panther)

    Votes: 110 39.6%
  • 3. Fine (happy panther)

    Votes: 26 9.4%
  • 4. Great (golfing panther)

    Votes: 9 3.2%

  • Total voters
    278
Thank you for the review, @amirm,
It is probably too late to request the details of how your room resonance mode was determined.:(
You can see it here in my room eq review: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/audyssey-room-eq-review.12746/

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

Don't hold your breath. Beolab 90 weighs much more than anyone would consider to climb up the NFS scanner, especially considering the price.

Up to this point praxis proved that anything costing more than 20.000€ is very unlikely to show up at Erin's or Amir's NFS.

Companies won't do it and if i had Kef Blade there is no freakin chance that i would send it anywhere outside my house and risk finish or, god forbid, functional damage in shipping and handling.
 
Some interesting remarks by Geoff Martin on B&O's sound design philosophy:
This is not surprising and certainly not contradictory, since the 12's were tuned with the height set so that the tweeter+ALT were at ear height (1.1 m off the floor, approximately 3 m away).

Please remember in this discussion that
  1. any loudspeaker has magnitude response that changes with angle of incidence - either in the vertical or horizontal plane.
  2. therefore, when we tune that loudspeaker we have to make a decision about where we're going to sit when we do the tuning. Whether that is "on axis" (i.e. either level with the tweeter when the loudspeaker is plumb, or equidistant to the loudspeaker drivers) or some place else is, more or less irrelevant. We have to pick a spot where it's tuned.
  3. We don't tune any loudspeaker so that it only sounds/measures well in one direction. That would be silly, since few of our customers clamp their heads into position in a "sweet spot". We check (meaning measuring and listening) every loudspeaker for its response (A) on-axis (what ever that might mean for a given loudspeaker), (B) in a listening window around the "on-axis" direction and ( C ) its power response (see my explanation of this in another forum).
  4. On-axis for any loudspeaker is not necessarily where you think it is. (For example, some loudspeakers (and I'm not talking about a B&O speaker here...) are tuned to be flat in a horizontal direction 30 degrees to one side, since not everyone likes toeing in their loudspeakers to the centre. If you know that your customers are probably not going to toe-in, then you would want to make a speaker that is best heard "off axis".)
In other words, a recommendation for one loudspeaker doesn't necessarily apply to another. As I said, BeoLab 12's were tuned with the tweeter at my ear-height. The BeoLab 18's were tuned with my ears at ear-height.

In other words, none of the loudspeakers in the current Bang & Olufsen portfolio are designed to give you a razor-flat on-axis magnitude response from DC to light at the cost of all else (like power response or directivity). This would only make sense if all of our customers lived in anechoic chambers (or, as a close second - used them as near field monitors in highly damped recording studios).
Thank you - this is most certainly not what I said. I mentioned distance during tuning for the benefit of those who are good at trigonometry. The question of "where is on-axis" is one of angle, not height or distance. However, angle can be calculated using height and distance if you can throw around a cosine or sine with relative ease. If you're worried about the on-axis response and nothing else, then you will have to get shorter as you move farther away. However, please remember that, in most cases, your distance from almost any loudspeaker in your room is likely greater than the room's critical distance. Consequently, most of the energy you hear is from the power response of the loudspeaker - not the on-axis or off-axis magnitude response.

So, my strong recommendation is to not place so much emphasis on the magnitude response of the loudspeaker at one single angle (or height and distance, if you prefer) unless your listening room is a recording studio or an anechoic chamber.
Although the BeoLab 9 and the BeoLab 20 have many similarities:
  • roughly similar external shapes and enclosures
  • the loudspeaker drivers are almost unchanged (the 20's woofer has 2 voice coils where the 9's only has one - apart from that they are the same driver)
From an acoustics and a sound design point of view, the 20 is not an upgraded 9 - it is a whole new loudspeaker. There was no conscious attempt to make the 20 sound like the 9. For example, we didn't sit them side by side and do a direct comparison until the very end of the development process of the 20.

This is because the DSP of the 20 allows us to to far more than is possible with the analogue processing of the 9. We do a great deal of work using the processing power in the DSP to counteract resonances (cause by various things in the hardware) in the time domain. This is not possible using analogue processing. In addition, we can ensure that the phase responses of the three drivers are aligned across the two crossovers (in the "old days" this was thought of as time-alignment, but time alignment is a somewhat one-dimensional way to think of the problem. You have to consider this problem of driver interaction in three-dimensional space and across frequency bands.) We can push the low frequency range of the 20 much lower because we can approach its physical limits more closely due to the DSP. And so on and so on...
 
Thanks for posting that. Problem is, even sound power is poor:

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The dashed red line is sound power. It doesn't remotely look smooth. Resonances are so bad that they even show up in Sound Power!
 
Thanks for posting that. Problem is, even sound power is poor:

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The dashed red line is sound power. It doesn't remotely look smooth. Resonances are so bad that they even show up in Sound Power!
Do you think there’s any possibility that the speaker itself is out of spec/damaged?
 
Harman research shows that focusing on sound power goes against listener preference.

That conclusion is based on the fact that the industry was aiming at flat sound power rather flat on-axis. and thus "focusing" on sound power.

I see nothing in Harman Research that says aiming for a resonance free gently downward sloping sound power (along side a flat on-axis response) is against listener preference.
 
I see nothing in Harman Research that says aiming for a resonance free gently downward sloping sound power (along side a flat on-axis response) is against listener preference.
You snuck in that flat on-axis response which we don't have here. If sound power is as you say, then early window will be the same. Which is Harman's conclusion. Sound power can follow with smoothness, or not.
 
That conclusion is based on the fact that the industry was aiming at flat sound power rather flat on-axis. and thus "focusing" on sound power.

I see nothing in Harman Research that says aiming for a resonance free gently downward sloping sound power (along side a flat on-axis response) is against listener preference.

You can't just focus on sound power. I'm with Earl Geddes on this and I think in this video he explains it very well:


Considering all measurements and @amirm 's listening tests, I think it's easy to conclude that this speaker would be very picky on how you set it up and it's performance will vary depending on program material which in my book is not desirable. It simply lacks smoothness and response accuracy regardless of where you point it.
 
Always find it fascinating how design decisions affect the radiation of a speaker.
Such innocent-looking vertical protrusions in the baffle relative to the midrange driver. They're angled and rounded, what's the big deal?
1679308713084.png
... and yet the small protrusions provide considerable side lobes in the vertical radiation. So that a 60° ceiling reflection compared to the on-axis FR also has undesired SPL overshoots.
1679309190554.png 1679309250610.png
 
@Patrick Bateman did quite a bit of experimentation over at DIYAudio some years ago:


He showed that the lens can actually measure quite well, only over a minimal area. He also showed the heavy resonances once you get out of that area. So probably there would have been a bit more favorable primary mic position. Obviously, this also means you'll have to position yourself at exactly the right spot to benefit from it.

I'm rather more surprised about the midrange and bass resonances. The cabinet is made from thick plastic that should be pretty resonance-free, and with DSP you should be able to get rid of most of the woofer and midrange issues. There is no port, so that makes it even easier.
 
No concrete prevents resonances, every enclosure has them and only damping helps. A resonant enclosure is another thing. However, the issue is the internal modes most of the time which will leave the box in some way, be it through the woofer cone, or by influencing the woofer response.
 
One should never expect hifi from lifestyle products - they are designed to serve the needs of people that place the stuff where the decor best allows for it.

That might be an accurate generalization--the lifestyle thing, I mean. Of course with B&O, it's the lifestyle of the rich and famous, whereas JBL lifestyle is more prole.

However, if you read ASR loudspeaker reviews (based a lot on the Harman schedules of design criteria), along with associated comments from the ASR loudspeaker crowd, one could easily conclude that you shouldn't expect 'hi-fi' from most established, dedicated, and primarily hi-fi oriented companies; companies whose goal may not necessarily include feng shui.
 
This is not surprising and certainly not contradictory, since the 12's were tuned with the height set so that the tweeter+ALT were at ear height (1.1 m off the floor, approximately 3 m away).
But the approximately corresponding +10° vertical response doesn't look that much better, except maybe the smoothness above 8 kHz:

1679325165882.png


So, my strong recommendation is to not place so much emphasis on the magnitude response of the loudspeaker at one single angle (or height and distance, if you prefer) unless your listening room is a recording studio or an anechoic chamber.
That's why the listeners window average was defined, but this is also poor not really better and similar to above +10° vertical measurement:

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Radio Shack once sold a speaker with that [patented/ pat pending, at the time] tweeter. Decades later when the era of eBay came to be, I could never figure out the model. Does anyone happen to remember that and know the model?
These?
 
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I gave it a "Fine" rating, then realized the price was $15,000, not $1,500. Headless panther at that price.
 
Question: Was it tested as it was positioned in the photo at the top? If so, why was "free" selected on the settings?
 
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