High end electronics maker to the rich and famous Bang & Olufsen has unveiled its first surround sound speaker system.
Designed to work alongside TVs made by B&O and others, the BeoLab 14 consists of a vase-ike subwoofer and four or five flower-inspired speaker units depending on your televisual set up.
If you're the kind of person who has invested in a B&O TV, you may well be in the market for a matching surround sound system and the good news is that your television can act as the centre channel - that takes your system up to a 5.1 set up.
One for all
But if you've only invested in something like a Samsung (heathen!) then you can still put the BeoLab 14 to good use, you'll just have to shell out for that fifth channel speaker.
That's new thinking for B&O - usually, it likes to keep things closed to outsiders, but while it sells 30,000 of its own TVs a year, it quite fancies a slice of the 200 million sets sold globally as well.
The stem-mounted speakers are rocking a flower-inspired design, although they look a little like vanity mirrors. Happily they can be stood on the floor with a long stem, a shelf with a short one or wall-mounted if you don't fancy either.
B&O says it fought a hard battle between design and audio performance and shot for the best of both, with each speaker made from a single piece of aluminium with no seams or screws visible.
Sadly it's not a wireless system - B&O says that it considered doing away with the wires but the fact that each unit would then need a power system (the subwoofer takes care of all that now) as well as its own temperature regulating tech meant that each would become larger and, crucially, unsightly.
The BeoLab 14 surround sound system is available from today for the princely sum of £2,495.
