This is a review, listening tests, equalization and detailed measurements of the Bang & Olufsen Beosound Balance wireless speaker. It was kindly drop shipped by a member and costs US $3,299.
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The Balance doesn't deviate much from the typical look of these speakers but does manage to feel/look luxurious. Importantly, it is substantially heavier than any other smart speaker I have tested, bringing hopes of higher playback volumes and bass response. I was pleased to find good connectivity including analog input which I used for measurements (does away with latency of wireless connection):
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I do wish the ports were labeled however. The info is in the manual but that is also hard to read with every paragraph written in what seemed like a dozen different languages.
The design is complex as you can see from this picture:
There is a woofer on the bottom followed by midrange in the middle and array of tweeters.
Typical of the class, you need to use an App to setup and configure the speaker. Like most of its competition, the app was a bit glitching, ending the setup with an error. But when I restarted the app, all was well and speaker was ready to be used. Navigation through the app was non-intuitive. For example, when try to play Tidal, it got me to login but then complained that the content can only play through the Tidal App???
Upon configuration, speaker has a forced room optimization where it played a single CHIRP tone and proceeded to activate that mode. Playing music at that point sounded decidedly "wrong" so after much searching, I found the option to turn that off. Turning it back on forces the calibration all over again, making it hard to do AB testing of what the difference is.
There are four or so playback scenarios from voice to "optimal." It defaults to Optimal which I again found to not sound good. For simplicity of measurements (and better sound as you will see later), I configured the Balance in "Front" mode. As the name indicates, this setting sounds more like a normal speaker with sound firing toward you.
Measuring such a complex design and interpreting the results is not straightforward. As such, I highly recommend that you don't skim through the review quick and do pay attention to the listening test section.
If you are not familiar with the measurements that are about to follow, I recommend watching my video on
understanding speaker measurements:
Bang & Olufsen Beosound Balance Speaker Measurements
It was challenging to find the tweeter as you cannot feel its location through the fabric. Nor is there a clear "front" reference. I guess at both, resulting in the following anechoic measurements:
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Due to complexity of the soundfield at higher frequencies with multiple tweeters overlapping each other, the off-axis response past 8 kHz or so drops in accuracy. On-axis response though, was hardly impacted. At first glance, this seems like a mess: we have pronounced resonances around 1500 and 3300 Hz and droop around 220 Hz. Note however that bass response goes quite deep which is very unusual for such a small speaker. The sound power hugs the on-axis response indicating that we have an omni speaker despite me selecting "front" mode. Given this early window and predicted in-room responses mirror on-axis response:
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It is harder to see the omni behavior through directivity plots but it is there if you look at the scale:
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See how the response goes to -180 degree or so up about 1.5 kHz. The contour graph shows this more clearly:
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While there are potholes, the response is generally even in amplitude across the full ±180 degree spans.
Vertical response is decently broad but obviously not omni:
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I stopped sweeping the speaker at 86 dBSPL and instead, added 80 dB for refence in our distortion tests:
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Subjectively the response was much cleaner than what the above shows, perhaps due to ultra low distortion between 1 and 4 KHz where our hearing is most sensitive.
The waterfall display is super busy due to multiple resonances:
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Step response also shows high level of complexity due to multiple drivers firing:
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Bang & Olufsen Beosound Balance Listening Tests and Equalization
Based on my setup experience and measurements I expected horrible sound when I fired the speaker in my near-field setup. To my surprise, the opposite was true: the deep bass was quite satisfying overall fidelity seemed pretty good! Surprised, I changed the setup from Front to Optimal and fidelity sank big time. I then ran the Room EQ and that made things even worse! On this topic, I don't see how EQ works when the measurement is at speaker rather than listening position.
I turned off Roon EQ and set the speaker back to front. Then started to develop a few crude filters to back out major issues in on-axis response:
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Sorry, forgot to drop down and show the actual filter settings (can't do it now without repowering the speaker). Will show them later. For now, it should be rather clear what the filters do. The collective set markedly improved fidelity. Female vocals were now more balanced and not so forward as with the stock tuning. That deep and clean sounding bass was there to provide major satisfaction.
Spatial effects were a major surprise. On some tracks with high frequency instrumentation, there was a gorgeous halo of sound in a hemisphere behind the speaker. Closing my eyes, I enjoyed that image maybe even more than a set of speakers in stereo configuration! There seems to be something to this omni response and back firing mid to high frequencies.
Sub-bass response was poor with clear distortion but go up a few hertz and per my earlier notes, the bass was absolutely clean. FYI most of my listening was with the volume at 50% with listening distance of about 2 meters/6 feet. Based on this, I think you will be able to fill even a large room with the Balance speaker.
Once there, I did not want to stop to take a picture of the speaker in my photo booth! The overall fidelity and experience was that good with equalization.
Conclusions
Coming into this review, I was not hopeful that I could quantify the performance of B&O Balance. But when I completed the full circle of analysis including listening tests and EQ, the story came together. First, the modes and room EQ in my opinion do a lot of damage. I don't know what listening tests were performed but in my book, they just sound wrong. Yes, I could have made before and after measurements but this is a complex speaker and single microphone measurements are going to be hard to interpret. Fortunately these modes can be turned off. Then with some EQ -- which would have been nice to have in the speaker itself as it clearly has that ability -- produced excellent sound. Despite the complexity of the speaker, measurements did provide great insight as to what needed fixing. Again, shame that this was not done in the speaker to begin with.
The old saying of diamond in a rough describes the speaker. If you can EQ it, I can recommend the Beosound Balance. We can fix the flaws with EQ but can't bring bass response and dynamics to the table which is the major failing of this class of speakers.
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