Today we’re taking a look at a perhaps more obscure Bang & Olufsen product, the Beosound Shape. It’s a modular sound system designed exclusively to be wall-mounted, launched in 2017 during the Milan Design Week.
What makes the Shape unique is obviously the design, but also how your order and set it up, as well as how it sounds – let’s dive a bit deeper into those things.
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Being modular, the Shape is made up of these hexagonal “tiles”. When you want to get one of these, the first step is to decide how many tiles you want, how to arrange them and which colours you want for the covers. This happens online, where you can either start from one of the example designs or fully from zero. It’s simple and fun to do, but the trickiest part is actually deciding!
Once you’re happy with the arrangement and colours, you select “how much sound” this thing should make.
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Each of the tiles in the Shape has its own purpose. Choosing higher sound performance essentially adds more speaker tiles and amplifiers to match, whereas less sound will add more empty tiles with acoustic damping material in them. Your system can have as few two speaker tiles and as many as 40(!). The 8-tile system I showed earlier has four speaker tiles in it, which it comfortably fits with all the other necessities, such as the amplifiers, streamer box and the electrical outlets.
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This is what we see when the covers are peeled off. The placement of the different tiles within the arrangement is not random – it’s decided by an algorithm when you design your Shape. The algorithm also generates a shopping list for your dealer to order e.g. the right cables in right lengths, as well as a “design ID” that’s used later by the B&O app during first-time setup to identify your unique arrangement and set up the sound processing.
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Installation is pretty straight-forward though somewhat tedious – Beosound Shape is almost always installed by a B&O installer, unless you’re a fool like myself who thinks it’s a fun weekend activity to do yourself.
First to go on the wall is the “star rail system”, which is a lightweight bracket system that the actual tiles will then screw onto. The rails make it easy to get everything aligned with a spirit level.
With the tiles on, it’s time to run the cables wherever they need to go.
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So how does everything actually connect together? The heart of the system is the Beoconnect Core streamer, which generates a unique audio signal for each speaker tile (more on that later), and those get transmitted to all the amplifiers in a daisy-chain via Cat7 cables. It uses something called A2B, which is a serial audio bus typically used in the automotive industry. This is how the system is able to support up to ten amplifiers, with four speaker tiles connected to each of them.
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Each amplifier tile, on the other hand, has eight channels (80 watts each), one for each tweeter and woofer on the connected speaker tiles. There are no passive crossovers in the system, as is the norm in the B&O land. All of that is handled by the DSP in the amplifier tiles. During installation, it’s just important to plug the correct speaker tile into the correct output on the amplifier, so that sound comes out from where it’s expected.
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When everything is plugged in and all the cables are nicely managed (you just run them through the channels along the perimeters on each tile), it’s time to connect the system to power.
Beoconnect Core will notice that it’s in a Beosound Shape and will ask you to finalise the setup. Enter the Design ID from earlier, and magically your very own arrangement appears in the app, with correct covers and all. A quick check that every speaker makes sound when it’s supposed to, you’re ready to play.
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So what about the sound? You can of course do traditional stereo, where the left and right channels come out of the speakers at the extreme ends, but because we have more speakers and the system knows exactly where each of them is, we can do some clever tricks with them.
The traditional flaw of stereo is that unless you sit right in the middle, you mostly hear what’s coming out of the closest speaker. One of the modes on the Shape is called “Band on the wall”, that addresses this.
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“Band on the wall” is a patented algorithm that kind of “splits” a stereo signal such that no matter where you listen, what’s supposed to be in the middle stays there, and what’s supposed to come from the side, comes from the side, so you’re free to move about without losing the sense of separation in the recording. It works remarkably well and it’s my favourite way to listen to music on the Shape.
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What about rearranging the tiles or adding more to the setup? You can hop online to create a new design, get the relevant extra tiles or reorder the existing ones, and pop in the new Design ID in the app to get the sound and icon to match, so the system can evolve with your needs and tastes.
So there you have it, Beosound Shape, a quirky way to get sound into your life or even improve room acoustics (if you get a lot of damper tiles!). Curious to know something I didn’t cover? Let me know!
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@tuomas_h Thank you for the thread! Could you do another one about the Level? Notably its repairability/future proofing features.
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@romainheuillard Good suggestion! I’ll see when I get around to this.
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@tuomas_h interesting, never seen such, thanks! Couple of Qs:
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@ikkeT Sure!
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@tuomas_h Amazing – thanks for the thread 🙂 I’ve loved B&O since I was old enough to afford a Beovision MX1500 (a long time ago now!)
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@tuomas_h very cool product!
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