How does it sound?
In short: rather impressive. When you press the round play-button you hear a nice neutral sound. This is not a boombox designed to blow people away with bass. It’s a speaker dock which might take a while for you to appreciate. Listening in a busy display area doesn’t do it justice either. You need to take your time, place it in a quiet room, close your eyes and listen to your favourite music. Only then you’ll realise the Beosound displays the entire soundspectrum nicely with clear highs, nice mids and decent bass. Very important: the bitrate of your music needs to have a certain treshold. Despite having its own amplifier and circumventing your iDevice’s, it doesn’t perform miracles on low quality songs. Whenever you play songs with a bitrate of 192kbps, and most certainly 128kbps, you will leave a big part of the Beosound’s potential unused.
There are other things to do with the Beosound 8 as well, such as having a party. Open the volume completely and you’ll immediately have dancing friends and complaining neighbours. A very nice thing is that the sound never distorts and will always sound balanced (compared to the majority of the competition). The volume coming from the relatively small speakers is plenty to fill a 100m2 room. Don’t let this be the main reason to buy a Beosound 8 however, because the device has so much more to offer.
There’s AirPlay after all
B&O also has the BeoPlay A8 on offer: the same device, but with AirPlay and detachable dock connector – which adds to the looks. However, you can count on a surcharge of 300 euros. This leads to the BeoPlay A8 being nearly double as expensive as the majority of its competitors, which also have AirPlay. This makes those competitors very interesting all of a sudden…
