Bang & Olufsen Beosound Premiere Review

Design

• Odd-shaped black loudspeaker recess
• …yet stunning build quality
• More ideally pegged for wall mounting

The B&O Beosound Premiere comes in a choice of three colours. A very becoming natural aluminium was the version sent over to me, but you can plump for either gold or black anthracite aluminium if you prefer. The latter is obviously a wiser choice if you wish to keep TV reflections to a minimum in a dark room.

But what most characterises the soundbar is the long front-side oval recess and into which are mounted a good portion of the loudspeaker drivers. This gouged out zone gives the soundbar a rather industrial look, although it can be concealed with an optional oak grille.

But that still won’t hide the fact that with the included stand, the narrow-depth bar stands at 17.2cm, enough to conceal the bottom part of your TV’s screen if plonked on the same shelf. The Premiere does, however, come with sturdy wall-mount hardware, and by which I assume most punters will choose to secure the device.

Without the table-top stand mount, the soundbar is 16cm tall. Before you remove the contents from the beautiful packing box, B&O recommends attaching the stand to the body with four hex screws (wrench provided) and the help of two cardboard templates which ensure their correct alignment to the enclosure.

One of the defining quirks of the Beosound Premiere is a centrally-mounted and upfiring 1.5in full-range driver concealed behind an aluminium grille. It’s a typical design feature for a high-end B&O device, although even more alluring is the topside touch button backlit strip and from which you can select presets, control the volume and skip tracks.

And then there’s the supercool LED volume light that streaks across the topside of the speaker recess and reflects on the lower facing side. Now, there’s two good reasons why B&O will appeal to the luxury crowd.

The Beosound Premiere sports a stunningly forged and detailed outer casing. Even the 8.5kg weight adds to the sense of robust and no-nonsense engineering. I’ve certainly come to expect this level of professionalism from this established pillar of Scandinavian manufacturing.

B&O likes to draw attention to the Premiere’s Cradle to Cradle Certified Bronze badge. These environmental gongs are awarded to responsibly manufactured products with both sustainability and upgradeability baked in.

 Features

• Beolink speaker and B&O/LG TV integration
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
• 10 Drivers

The Premiere incorporates 10 drivers, all of which are employed for immersive audio with the Premiere able to decode up to Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 (there is no DTS:X). There are also 580 watts available from discrete power amplifiers to share among the configuration with 70 watts allocated to each of the four largest racetrack woofers.

Connections are recessed round the back and can be neatly hidden with a clip-on plastic door. It includes HDMI eARC for connecting to your TV, a USB-C port (analogue audio) and network inputs for a LAN and Beolink speaker expansion and LG/B&O TV integration.

To add to the mix is B&O’s proprietary Wide Stage technology for lending genuine spaciousness and channel separation to the soundstage. The claimed frequency response spans 34Hz – 23kHz. Even though there’s no subwoofer with the package, the soundbar can deliver plenty of low-end grunt.

EQ listening modes in the form of movie, music, TV, game and night are well-honed for their respective sources. There is also plenty of scope to create your own EQs with nifty channel bias controls in the excellent B&O app. The latter runs you through an easy setup procedure once the Premiere has landed onto your local network (either using Wi-Fi or an Ethernet cable).

A brief calibration process, known as Room Compensation, spits out an audio sweep to optimise the performance for your space. It’s worth doing as I found the bass and midrange response dialled in with more accuracy when I compared ‘before’ and ‘after’.

Note that the Beosound Premiere does not come with a remote control, presumably because the manufacturer assumes most customers will use the app with a phone or tablet. But there is an option to buy the steel-framed Beoremote One (Bluetooth and IR) for an additional £400.

It might make more sense to acquire this programmable device if you are more heavily invested in the B&O ecosystem and its associated speakers and displays. If you wish to expand out your home cinema to include, say, dedicate left, right and surround speakers, B&O suggests the Beolab 8 fronts and/or Emerge surrounds. All components can be controlled with the company’s proprietary and (as mentioned) Beolink networked multi-room/smart home tech.

Hi-res streaming aficionados are well catered for with Apple AirPlay, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, HomeMedia, Deezer Connect and QPlay 2.0. Of course, Bluetooth streaming (v5.4 BLE/EDR) comes as standard.

Sound Quality

• Huge dynamics
• Pinpoint sound effects placement
• Balanced and refined music listening

Bang & Olufsen has a big fan base. Its products remove a lot of the legwork for consumers deciding what to buy. That’s why they are a choice brand for many department stores and well-known online emporia. The Beosound Premiere is delightfully easy to set up but also imbues enough high-end sound and tweakability to lure in audiophiles as well.

I reach for a couple of my Blu-ray demo discs, which don’t get an airing often enough. One of the Dolby Atmos platters includes the stunningly recorded Amaze and Leaf theatrical trailers. The former proves that the Premiere can plumb some bassy depths during the thunder rumbles, and enough to vibrate the sofa. The soundbar might not mine the subsonic cues that a dedicated subwoofer could unearth, but the effect is confident, tight and fast.

But where the B&O is so accomplished is in its ability to cast the soundfield’s elements to the extremities of the room. The single maple seed tracking its course to the stream clearly swoops above my head and then surges towards the left and right axes. All the sounds of the forest meanwhile are both highlighted and clear. I don’t think I have heard this level of discernment and three-dimensionality from a standalone soundbar, certainly not for under £5k. Impressive stuff.

I also turn to one of my demo staples, the tsunami wave and storm sequence from Aquaman (2017, 4K UHD). Here, the sense of immersion is exemplary with the Premiere showing off dynamic power juxtaposed with multiple subtle effects rising to the fore. It’s not as if the dialogue gets shortchanged either in the preceding exchanges – voices are resonant, isolated and articulate.

If you are looking for hi-fi grade audio for the living room, the Premiere steps up on this front too. Sunscream’s Perfect Motion (Tidal) channels a club-like thunder through the soundbar. But the lower midrange of the bass guitar and kick drum is balanced and neutral, while never scrimping on sheer force. The vocal moves forward into the space and instruments are finely separated.

Perhaps most satisfying is the Premiere’s layering of orchestral recordings. The soundstaging in Howells’s Pastoral Rhapsody (Chandos/Tidal) is vivid with the woodwind and brass sections clearly identifiable in the virtual sphere. The strings are likewise flighted, soaring and crisp.

Should you buy it?