I don't see enough substance here, at least until some professional reviewers can get their hands on them or we get to hear them (and how many dealers will carry them?).
The problem once again just like BL5 is that B&O seems to have thrown a bunch of drivers in a cabinet in an effort to create a wider "sweet spot" within an entire room to enjoy the music without losing details. Ok, that's fine. But there's no mention of any driver improvements to increase the *resolution and imaging* starting with the driver itself. Sure, the B&W 800 Series Diamond speakers don't have this incredible ability to bounce off every surface in a room and still keep a convincing stereo soundstage but... so what? If you ARE sitting in the sweet spot and even further, if you have a good Room EQ, the dividends are incredible with the diamond tweeter and the FST midrange.
I certainly hope that for 70,000.00 or whatever silly price these things will cost, there's more substance here than novel placement of cooling fins and beam width control. Yes, I read about both of these innovations on Geoff's site, but even with all the supposed innovation in the BL5 that stood since 2003, it still doesn't sound better than even an 804 Diamond D2 which is the smallest floor stander. In some ways, the BL5 doesn't really sound much better than my Penta IIIs. Sure, it throws sound out wider, but that doesn't matter when I sit down for serious listening anyway as I'm not going to sit off in a corner of the room. Transducer technology has advanced SO far in the last 20 years that you can not just ignore that part of the equation.
One of the performance aspects and advantages of the Beolab 5 design with the acoustic lenses, over contemporary designs such as the B&W 800 series, is that by reducing midrange and treble beaming and consequently giving a very even polar, or 'power' response, deleterious room reflections propagated by an uneven polar response, are largely negated. This in turn helps with the sense of correct spatial perspectives as heard in real life - i.e. a concert hall with classical music for example, as well as a very well balanced frequency response at the listening position - regardless whether one is listening tightly on axis to the speaker drivers.
As to the drivers in the new Beolab 90, Scanspeaks Illuminators and Revelators are widely regarded to be amongst the very best 'audiophile' speaker transducers available.
The big advantage of the B&O design as always, will be a fully active speaker with prodigious DSP; something no passive design can hope to emulate in performance and control terms.
Certainly in terms of earlier B&W designs with the 800 series, excellent speakers though they are, the decision was made to NOT follow with active designs, not for technical, but purely commercial reasons. Audiophiles prefer to mix and match and tweak as the 'hobby', and as such, despite the proven advantages of fully active speakers, it would've been commercial folly for B&W to go down that path - most unfortunately I must say.
I accept that it's quite subjective and personal, but I respectfully disagree re the B&W 804 D re a Beolab 5 comparision. If the sense of not so much very high quality HiFi reproduction, but rather that one could suspend disbelief that one is listening to a real life performance and not a recording, then it is the Beolab 5 everytime when listening to 'natural' acoustic instruments.
In terms of bass extension and volume a B&W 804 D would simply be unable to compete - the Lab 5 is capable of clean output to around 16z on measured figures.
I'm not bagging B&W - I owned a pair of B&W speakers for the best part of 20 odd years - but I'd put my Beolab 9's somewhere between 803d's and 802d's in many ways, IF the closest approach to the original sound is the criteria. And the Beolab 5 sits well above a Beolab 9 in outright performance terms.
Personally, I think the speakers are aimed at different markets - B&W's 800 speakers are utterly superb - and aimed at the 'serious' audiophile; B&O's designs on the other hand, are equally superb, but aimed more or less at the music and film connoisseur; someone who has the resources to pay for very high quality speakers, and is mostly interested in the result, not in the method of getting there with wrist thick speaker cables sitting on cable risers on the floor, angle iron amplifier racks and microwave oven sized amplifiers making 'audiophile' statements in a room.
Speaking as a classical music lover and trained classical musician, and 'ex' audiophile (well, the neurotic kind at least!) B&O floats my boat better than any other 'brand' or design ethos I've come across in the HiF/AV/Audiophile world. But that's just me... :-)
Kind regards
John... 😐
