"Why do many audiophiles hate B&O products"?

Some of them wish their audiophile products looked like B&O - but audiophile products usually look like.. well.. not particularly good.
There may also be some audiophiles, who like the B&O techniques, but want it to look like... well... audiophile stuff.
Then there are some, who can't admit to actually liking B&O due to the risk of being made the laugh of the audiophile crowd.

Martin

B&O is not tweakable - audiophiles like to fine tune their systems and B&O just connect simply and have no adjustments. Having said that, B&O also have made some products that are really not that good and cost a lot. And of course a lot of audiophiles have not actually listened to a good B&O system.

Probably because, amongst other reasons, B&O are seen as either a design led brand / company, or more simply a style over substance company.

When B&O send very few of their products around to the big publications for testing (even where it would make sense to), so as a brand audiophiles (generally snobbish by nature too) find B&O easy to dismiss.

B&O hasn't ever been respected by the "audiophile" types, at least since the mid 70's when I first got into audio as a hobby. Back then they used to call them "Bang And Awfulsound." Lots of reasons:

1. B&O's approach has historically been the exact opposite of the audiophile types, in that as mentioned above it's set the stuff up once and then listen to music. Too many audiophiles listen to the equipment more than the music, and without being able to constantly tweak things (different wires, etc.) there's no "hobby" there.

2. B&O has traditionally not been very forthcoming about putting their gear up for review, and also fairly opaque about what the specs were. Again, philosophically they felt, I believe, specs are less important than the fact it sounds good, but people will tend to buy on specs, even ones that don't matter. This is how you got the mid to late 70's THD wars, where a lot of makers used ever increasing amounts of global feedback in amp design to drive THD figures down, while upping the much more audible TIM distortion.

3. As said, B&O has had some stuff that has been average in performance at high prices. On the other hand, in speaker design they recognized and addressed issues that a lot of designers don't pay attention to yet today, such as in their phase link speakers which were well ahead of the curve design wise. And much of what the "audiophile" community thinks actually matters in audio design has less to do with reality than with marketing fantasy.

All of which is why I think that while things like the BL90 and 50 are outstanding examples of advanced thinking into what matters in speaker design, made possible due to advanced DSP processing which is finally available, pursuing them was a waste of resources, especially during the modern period when B&O is suffering business setbacks. There is no way I believe the market for these speakers is big enough to rationalize the development costs. The market is just too small, they won't really make an impact in the "audiophile" market because most won't even consider B&O, plus the megabuck speaker market has a lot of competition. As an example, when discussing the BL90 with an audiophile guy I know, he could or would not care about the processing, but was obsessing over how could the use those awful Class D amps, they should have let the user decide to use tuba amps and different wires. 😉

Some member handles the frase: "Ban the boring". That's what I become when hearing these sayings. The same counts for people who like to say :"B&O, isn't that Philips?"  Arghh. I get bored by those types.

.. and to add to that. It always ends is the same discussion..

Maybe it is simply because Bang & Olufsen isn’t and never intended to be an audiophile brand (whatever that is).

MM