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Bang&Olufsen says it will defy luxury slowdown as 'rich will only become richer'

41 points by hhs 3y ago

1-6 3y ago
This is true in reality but a bad model to build a business on especially if it’s an electronics company. What Apple did is difficult to emulate and brands like Hermes and LV have stuck to craftsmanship and scarcity. B&O used to be a featured on National Lampoon’s when a piece of debris flew into Margo’s bedroom and wrecked it. I don’t think people care much about their pretty audio pieces anymore. Audio devices and screens have become accessories to the real device that holds the value: the smartphone. But one day, that will not be the case either as our cloud devices will eventually trump smartphones. Apple isn’t going anywhere but intangible virtual goods will be more and more commonplace.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  It’s much easier in audio equipment where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Premium brands mostly sell things like premium materials which subjectively make things sound “better”. Phones are a thousand times more complicated and the state of the art for chips is constantly changing
  - 1-6 3y ago
    B&O will have to build hand carved (wooden) or CNC milled electronics that borders on art. Hopefully the’ll incorporate upgradeable CPUs or microcontrollers then to really make it timeless. I can possibly see a direction there.
    - peatmoss 3y ago
      Article mentions a £110,000 speaker line. For that money, I think you'd be better off paying a sound engineer and a woodworker to build a custom speaker set for your space. I struggle to imagine that B&O can do anything at a factory to deliver better sound than what could be achieved with a decent survey of the space and affordable quality components. A custom woodworker can certainly build extremely attractive, one-of-a-kind enclosures that conform to published specifications about speakers. Such a custom speaker design wouldn't even be full of snake oil, and would have the authenticity to impress any non-bullshit plebeian that a £110k-speaker-buying person invites to their home. :-)
  - dsr_ 3y ago
    That's incorrect. In the last 30 years (since 1993), we have got class D amplifiers which can be both power-efficient and as flat as human ears can detect, switching power supplies to go along with them, DACs which are both cheap and absolutely transparent, MP3 and other perceptual lossy codecs, FLAC and ALAC, near field scanners to evaluate speaker performance, the Olive scoring method and several preference curves, and extreme improvements in bandwidth and storage.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      there were commercial class D amplifiers in the 1970s, Sony iirc. but back then Philips had a very cool amplifier, not class D, which fed a signal from the loudspeaker cone back into the negative feedback loop to correct any error!
      - dsr_ 3y ago
        They were invented in 1955, but high quality class D audio amplifiers have only been around since the mid90s, and are only now available as simultaneously good, high-power, and cheap. Servo-controlled subwoofers are readily available these days; full-range servo systems are comparatively rare, because the end user generally wants room-calibrated equalization anyway.
    - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
      Audiophools have been convinced that none of that faithfully reproduces a recording. It's tech for the common people who can't afford a real amp fed by oxygen free cabling to a phonorecord player with a 60 dB noise floor.
  - amluto 3y ago
    > where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Really? In the last 30 years, we have highly efficient, essentially perfect class D amplifiers. DACs and ADCs that are essentially perfect are cheap. We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them. We have enough bandwidth to stream lossless and near-lossless audio. We can combine cheap, excellent DSP with cheap, excellent amplifiers to make active speakers with excellent frequency response and appropriate limiting logic to avoid damaging the drivers.
    - pydry 3y ago
      Where are these cheap and excellent amps and speakers? As far as I was aware a near perfect DSP is cheap as chips but if you wanted a decent subwoofer (for instance) you still needed to pay $$$.
      - amluto 3y ago
        The actual speakers haven’t changed much, although I suspect many are increasingly designed around the availability of good DSP. But the good amps are all over. Look at any site with actual data. For example, this thing is definitely cheap: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/extron-xpa-1002-plus-amplifier-review.35557/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/e... Some of what’s going on is that TI and others are making very good class D amplifiers on a chip, and they’re fairly easy to integrate. Several companies (IMO sadly mostly Chinese) are selling integrated DSPs and amps that are fantastic and cost a couple hundred dollars. They probably outperform multiple thousands of dollars of gear from 30 years ago, and they are far smaller and generate much much less heat.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      >We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them What audio codecs should we be using?
      - amluto 3y ago
        On your computer? Opus, AAC, MP3 with a good encoder and an appropriate rate? Many choices are widely available and transparent. It’s the hidden codecs that still degrade audio. HD radio, most Bluetooth protocols, mobile and landline phones and the networks that interconnect them, etc. You don’t get much say in these.
  - ta988 3y ago
    There is a clear advancement. You used to need an amp and large speakers with long cables to have any kind of fidelity. Now you have decent sound with really small speakers. You can even listen to music on a laptop and it doesn't suck too much. We have tiny earbuds with no cable that isolate us from the outside sounds and also have a pretty incredible sound quality compared to what we had even 20 years ago in the same form factor.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      Even if we accept your claims about tiny earbuds and speakers (which I don't), the abysmally depressing fact is that we have nothing to listen to on them. All popular music has been systematically destroyed with dynamic compression since the late '90s.
      - mrob 3y ago
        You occasionally see remasters going against the trend and increasing dynamic range. Earache Records has several high dynamic range versions of classic metal albums on Bandcamp.
        ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
        That's nice to hear!
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        You might just want to stop listening to pop music. The way people engineer and mix pop music has traditionally been different from detail-oriented recordings and audiophile trappings. Before overcompression, pop music would trapeze between quiet acoustic sections and "wall of sound" crescendos that sounded awful on radio. Even further before that, fully soundstaged recordings got mixed down to mono to sound good on commodity listening hardware. There's a tenured history of making music worse to make it more widely enjoyable. The fact that the world's most popular headphones are lower-quality versions of the Earpods should tell you everything about the modern music landscape.
  - dangus 3y ago
    Digital surround sound audio debuted in theaters in 1992, and DTS was released as a competitor to Dolby in 1993. You couldn’t even get movie audio at home with more than two channels 30 years ago.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Audio equipment got a thousand times better in the last decade, never mind three decades. I remember small speakers being absolutely tinny and bad in the 90's. Now the speakers in my phone kicks the butt of a medium-sized radio from that era. Hell, my HomePod is on par with the much larger and vastly more expensive B&O hifi system I had then!
- blovescoffee 3y ago
  They do hundreds of millions of revenue per year. I'm guessing they're comfortable with that.
  - CheckSum24 3y ago
    [dead]
- b112 3y ago
  as our cloud devices will eventually trump smartphones. Was with you until this. Cloud? That's year 2000 talk. The "cloud" has already happened, and there's a move towards reversing this trend. With austerity measures at many companies, they're bringing stuff home. Or refusing to migrate. Cloud is stupid expensive, with very questionable value. Meanwhile, the whole node+composer+npm+etc trend is now eyed with immense wariness by many, many businesses and especially high security businesses. One dev needing a 10 line function, pulling in 2000 packages of "who knows who wrote this" and "what is the actual license here" and "my god was this repo sold to hacker $x yesterday?" and "damn, this is backdoored? how do we even audit all this stuff?" is being replaced with "just write a 100 lines of code, and don't use 1M lines of node instead!" And with the reversal and soon end of Pii as a profitable method of doing business, all those free frees are going to go away! No Pii, means no profit, means you have nothing worth value to give! And so many people I talk to, are annoyed that shows they buy, or books, or games, just vanish. People want things they can touch! They're mad at their internet connected TVs showing them ads, and spying on them. They hate online ovens and fridges and washing machines. They hate that their car sells info to the insurance company. Most people I know have had it. The cloud will always exist to some extent. But its hayday is over.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > with the reversal and soon end of Pii as a profitable method of doing business That's wishful thinking. For as much as I resist the modernization of technology, I haven't met any average-Joes with a bone to pick over the cloud. Most people don't even understand the difference between client and server anymore, let alone how much PII they leak or what the difference between browser apps is. At best, you'll get someone who says they detest surveillance but are powerless to stop it. The people I know wouldn't stop buying smartphones and Disney Plus if you doubled their price and removed every app and show that makes less than $10,000,000 annually. They are not going to meaningfully resist the cloud-ification of their favorite businesses. They admit they are trapped, and couldn't use a meaningful alternative if they tried.
    - b112 3y ago
      The trends, both legislative and case law, are towards ending this business model. I expect that within 5 years, Pii will be defunct as a legal business model.
andy99 3y ago
https://archive.md/PvZsD https://archive.md/PvZsD It's a reasonable bet to imagine society entering another aristocratic type period where we have an ultra wealthy class and a servant class like we did until WWI or so. To some extent we're already there with gig workers, but there's still more of a middle than there could be. I mean there are people who are cool paying $30 to have Starbucks delivered by people who probably barely net that in a day after gas and wear on their car.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  Your inclusion of the timeline relating to WWI made me wonder how much of that war (and WWII) were about economic disparity. I found this interesting article on the topic: https://www.promarket.org/2018/01/03/inequality-imperialism-first-world-war/ https://www.promarket.org/2018/01/03/inequality-imperialism-... It seems reasonable to assume that a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it will create similar conflict both here and in space (given how many of our ultra elite are pushing into outer space for the next great fortune).
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it Neither the beginning of WWI nor today are characterised with a lack of investment opportunities. If anything, economic disparity increases when investment opportunities are aplenty because that typically characterises a period of change.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - engineer_22 3y ago
    The 19th century was a period of intense social change as a result of the mastery of steam and steel. The economies of western European economies changed incredibly fast and national identities began to solidify around the identities of the people living there. The aristocratic tradition prior to the First World War was a result of an already large change from the feudal structure of pre-industrial Europe. It's interesting to try to draw parallels to the present day, but I think it's most important to remember we are participants of history and to behave as such.
el_duderino 3y ago
https://archive.is/PvZsD https://archive.is/PvZsD
lacrimacida 3y ago
At the expense of the poorest and least educated, who will desperately but their luxury goods for their status symbol. So depending on their marketing Bang&Olufsen could become the next Luis Vuiton or Gucci in their market niche
- narag 3y ago
  How can the poorest buy their luxury goods?
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    By being bad with their money.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    Via the innovation of "credit", which gets used by poor people (including me when I was poor and dumb) to purchase things you in reality can't afford.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    On credit, generally. Here's an Investopedia article about "why", which would be the natural followup question. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/091115/psychology-behind-why-people-buy-luxury-goods.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09111... That article doesn't reference Veblen goods, which seems like a relevant Wikipedia link. A Veblen good is a product, the perceived value of which is related to its price rather than its utility, in defiance of all common sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
    - narag 3y ago
      If you have credit, you're not really poor. The comment I responded to said poorest that seems even worse.
      - karaterobot 3y ago
mmaunder 3y ago
The purchase of a Rolex or Ferrari - or an incredibly overpriced sound system - is an attempt to buy a signal to others that you have taste. In fact you’re signaling how much your lack of taste is costing you. Sound gear is an excellent case in point. The studio monitors many albums are mixed on are intentionally mediocre (eg the Yamaha NS-10) to ensure it sounds great across a wide range of equipment. Even great quality studio gear is modestly priced compared to “hi fi” gear. Don’t try to buy taste. Learn about the subject and then do the work to buy or build something that is reasonably priced and outshines everything else on fundamentals, not on brand.
- pentae 3y ago
  For truly wealthy people their time is incredibly valuable so spending time learning about a field they are not expert in is going to be more costlier than just going out and buying a well established brand. In some cases with Rolex or Ferrari or Porsche these items can even appreciate in value.
  - mmaunder 3y ago
    I think you think that price is directly proportional to quality. It's not. Luxury goods are made luxury through a process of branding, pricing, and scarcity. Rolex is an excellent case study. They've been sponsoring athletes since the early 20th century when they sponsored Mercedes Gleitze to wear an Oyster around her neck when she swam the channel. You'll continue to notice the brand at F1, premier golfing events, and so on. And when it comes to purchasing, you literally can't walk into a Rolex dealer and buy a Submariner, for example, because they are made artificially scarce. If you were able to buy a sub, you'd buy it at around $13K and then immediately be able to sell it for around $18K or more. Rolex own the luxury category when it comes to conferring value on the brand and its products. So if you can't even buy a Submariner, what the hell is the strategy? They have a much larger range of second and third-tier watches that they'll sell you then and there and once you have a "relationship" with them, they might hook you up with something worth far more on the used market the moment you buy it. It's just a big fat hustle that relies on some specific psychological triggers. It relies on what Cialdini would call "social proof", meaning that others think it's cool so you think it's cool. It also relies on scarcity conferring value on something that would otherwise be valueless. It relies on our innate desire to hero-worship, as a species, which is where sponsorship comes in. So back to the comment I'm replying to: No, thinking that a luxury brand is simply quality at a high price is far too simplistic a world-view. You can buy great quality at a very reasonable price, and if you don't have time you can employ a professional shopper. But it's not about that. It's about laziness and signaling.
zanfr 3y ago
millenials are broke; genZ will use earbuds anyway; Id rather something functional than something rpetty and useless
- timeon 3y ago
  > genZ will use earbuds anyway Not sure how it is with genZ in particular, but it sometimes feels like people now use speakers even when making calls in public. Which kind of sucks - not only if you need to listen to it as passer by but especially if you are on the other side of the line and someone puts you automatically on loud. I get it that phones are so big now that one can not hold them next to ear but it seems that wearing earbuds is also not popular.
_fat_santa 3y ago
I can see what B&O is getting at. It's well known that "luxury products" are largely bought by those tying to "look rich" rather than the super wealthy. Unlike say Gucci or LV that sell goods directly to consumers, a large part of B&O's business is being a supplier to things that the super rich actually do buy. I hardly ever see a standalone B&O product but where I see them the most is in high end cars. Someone that's middle class and is just trying to "look rich" is going to be buying at $400 Gucci belt or hat but the real rich folks are buying high end cars, something the middle class individual buying stuff from Gucci doesn't have the money to do. I suspect that B&O thinks that while the market for the "$400 luxury product" (ie something the middle class individual could afford) will drop off while demand for high end cars/boats and other places where they are a supplier won't be affected as much because those are inherently different customer segments.
- tgtweak 3y ago
  B&O has some home audio setups that are more expensive than those luxury cars with b&o upgraded sound systems (beolab 90 for example). I think they're probably not referring to their entry level b&o smart speakers when they're making this claim.
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
B&O has always been sub-par technically. The depressing thing is that even "high-end" (or at least higher-end) brands now suck. I bought an NAD receiver a while back, thinking it would be a step up from "consumer" brands... and it is an unmitigated piece of shit. So I went back to the high end of "consumer" (this time a top-of-the-line Pioneer) only to find that despite having 10 amplifiers or so in it, I can't simply have A, B, and C speaker pairs to play music in my house and yard. And incredibly there's no viable workaround. Design acumen is dead.
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Pioneer elite is beyond nad in terms of quality unless you're in the ultra high end.
capableweb 3y ago
> “If you go to jewellery, you have a few brands, if you go to fashion, you have a few brands, if you go to cars, you have a few brands,” he said during an interview at the new Bang & Olufsen store in London this week. “In audio luxury, there is nobody else.” If I was a worker at Bang & Olufsen, the final quote would definitely make me cringe. There is both better and more "value-for-the-money" brands that are still expensive and would be called luxury, but its marketing is aiming for audio professionals rather than "luxury consumers".
yardie 3y ago
When I met my now wife she had a Beosound Ouverture in her flat. I asked her why she would buy something so expensive and she told me it wasn't that much and it was really pretty. I think she paid like 1100£ from John Lewis. As a gearhead this was in line with what I spend for some aftermarket NISMO parts. We moved in together wanted to upgrade the system and found it was incompatible with damn near anything. We literally shelved the Beosound (literally put on a bookshelf, it is quite pretty to look at) and bought a quality hi-fi system.
LegitShady 3y ago
This is just a (bad) advertisement masquerading as journalism. Bang and Olufson won't "defy" anything or anyone.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
They build premium speakers with a WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) that's so far off the charts, they're no longer an electronics company. Their speakers are so beautiful, it's almost better to think of them as a luxury furniture or interior design company. I think it's absolutely the right business decision for them to lean into this unfair status, and try to make their products Veblan goods like the luxury fashion houses already have.
buggeryorkshire 3y ago
B&O are weird. I used to live in Cheltenham UK where they had a store. Was helping a friend install a £40k kitchen island top and a guy from B&O came round at the same time - sharp suit, laptop, briefcase. Turned out he was out to do his 6 monthly retune of the Freeview or whatever channels on the B&O TV. Plugged the laptop into the TV, which must have been 10 years old at the time (it was one of the first fat flat screens I think), pressed some buttons then said goodbye. Some of their audio stuff was awful, form over function, especially anything with Bluetooth. But they do look nice and again from memory stuff was upgradable, so even if you paid through the arse for a portable speaker, it would support BT5 in the future or whatever.
dessant 3y ago
Through a series of unfortunate events I ended up briefly owning seven brand new Beoplay Portal PC/PS headphones in the summer of 2022, and keeping the last one that was purchased in exasperation. The products were all bought from three different authorized dealers across the EU, and despite the serial numbers and manufacturing dates being spread out, mostly all of the headphones had manufacturing deffects: - The clamping force of the headbands had considerable variation, some of the headphones were very comfortable, one fell off from your head if you looked down, while two of them caused headaches after wearing them for 20 minutes - The firmness of the foam inside the earpads and of the lambskin also had variations - Some of the products made a popping sound if you slightly pressed the cushion on the headband - The painted white L and R letters inside the earcups had various brown spots - Three headphones made a squeaking sound when you adjusted the length of the arms, one of them was also squeaking during normal use - The material of the storage bag was half as thick if the product had a later serial number - One of the products had a broken BLE module and would not connect I got some casual use out of the headphones I have kept for about 6 months, and despite treating the product like jewelry, the headband cushion material has started separating from a hidden seam. The product was quickly replaced by Bang & Olufsen. An app is required to adjust the EQ and access other features that are advertised on the sales page, but the app forces you to sign up for a B&O account and share personal information such as your name and email address, then register the product. You couldn't find any information about the requirement for account setup and product registration anywhere, not on the sales page, and not in the user manual. I believe this is at least a GDPR violation. The headphones sometimes forget the customized settings, and after a couple of months of use, the app now has a hard time connecting to the paired device. The headphones all sounded great, but from what I've read and experienced, Bang & Olufsen seems to hide shoddy manufacturing tolerances behind bespokeness, even for their most expensive products, and I doubt this is the user experience the rich are craving.
mynameisnoone 3y ago
Unfortunately, that also means their customer base is shrinking and so will their profits. But unlike brands that are passionate about their craft like say Koenigsegg, expensive trash is still trash. Their value proposition is in providing tokens to reassure the desperately insecure, the ignorant, and the tasteless. While that has economic value, they're painting themselves into a smaller and smaller corner. Fun fact: B&O CD players were used in every 90's movie as a signal of Yuppie assholes.
tim333 3y ago
As the owner of an old Linn turntable I dispute that B&O are the only player at the high end. Why not a Linn "Klimax System. A complete, integrated package with superlative sonic performance. From £105,000"? https://www.linn.co.uk/uk/full-systems https://www.linn.co.uk/uk/full-systems

41 points by hhs 3y ago

1-6 3y ago

This is true in reality but a bad model to build a business on especially if it’s an electronics company. What Apple did is difficult to emulate and brands like Hermes and LV have stuck to craftsmanship and scarcity. B&O used to be a featured on National Lampoon’s when a piece of debris flew into Margo’s bedroom and wrecked it. I don’t think people care much about their pretty audio pieces anymore. Audio devices and screens have become accessories to the real device that holds the value: the smartphone. But one day, that will not be the case either as our cloud devices will eventually trump smartphones. Apple isn’t going anywhere but intangible virtual goods will be more and more commonplace.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
It’s much easier in audio equipment where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Premium brands mostly sell things like premium materials which subjectively make things sound “better”. Phones are a thousand times more complicated and the state of the art for chips is constantly changing
- 1-6 3y ago
  B&O will have to build hand carved (wooden) or CNC milled electronics that borders on art. Hopefully the’ll incorporate upgradeable CPUs or microcontrollers then to really make it timeless. I can possibly see a direction there.
  - peatmoss 3y ago
    Article mentions a £110,000 speaker line. For that money, I think you'd be better off paying a sound engineer and a woodworker to build a custom speaker set for your space. I struggle to imagine that B&O can do anything at a factory to deliver better sound than what could be achieved with a decent survey of the space and affordable quality components. A custom woodworker can certainly build extremely attractive, one-of-a-kind enclosures that conform to published specifications about speakers. Such a custom speaker design wouldn't even be full of snake oil, and would have the authenticity to impress any non-bullshit plebeian that a £110k-speaker-buying person invites to their home. :-)
- dsr_ 3y ago
  That's incorrect. In the last 30 years (since 1993), we have got class D amplifiers which can be both power-efficient and as flat as human ears can detect, switching power supplies to go along with them, DACs which are both cheap and absolutely transparent, MP3 and other perceptual lossy codecs, FLAC and ALAC, near field scanners to evaluate speaker performance, the Olive scoring method and several preference curves, and extreme improvements in bandwidth and storage.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    there were commercial class D amplifiers in the 1970s, Sony iirc. but back then Philips had a very cool amplifier, not class D, which fed a signal from the loudspeaker cone back into the negative feedback loop to correct any error!
    - dsr_ 3y ago
      They were invented in 1955, but high quality class D audio amplifiers have only been around since the mid90s, and are only now available as simultaneously good, high-power, and cheap. Servo-controlled subwoofers are readily available these days; full-range servo systems are comparatively rare, because the end user generally wants room-calibrated equalization anyway.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    Audiophools have been convinced that none of that faithfully reproduces a recording. It's tech for the common people who can't afford a real amp fed by oxygen free cabling to a phonorecord player with a 60 dB noise floor.
- amluto 3y ago
  > where there haven’t been any real advancements in the last 30 years. Really? In the last 30 years, we have highly efficient, essentially perfect class D amplifiers. DACs and ADCs that are essentially perfect are cheap. We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them. We have enough bandwidth to stream lossless and near-lossless audio. We can combine cheap, excellent DSP with cheap, excellent amplifiers to make active speakers with excellent frequency response and appropriate limiting logic to avoid damaging the drivers.
  - pydry 3y ago
    Where are these cheap and excellent amps and speakers? As far as I was aware a near perfect DSP is cheap as chips but if you wanted a decent subwoofer (for instance) you still needed to pay $$$.
    - amluto 3y ago
      The actual speakers haven’t changed much, although I suspect many are increasingly designed around the availability of good DSP. But the good amps are all over. Look at any site with actual data. For example, this thing is definitely cheap: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/extron-xpa-1002-plus-amplifier-review.35557/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/e... Some of what’s going on is that TI and others are making very good class D amplifiers on a chip, and they’re fairly easy to integrate. Several companies (IMO sadly mostly Chinese) are selling integrated DSPs and amps that are fantastic and cost a couple hundred dollars. They probably outperform multiple thousands of dollars of gear from 30 years ago, and they are far smaller and generate much much less heat.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    >We have essentially perfect audio codecs, if only we could get people to use them What audio codecs should we be using?
    - amluto 3y ago
      On your computer? Opus, AAC, MP3 with a good encoder and an appropriate rate? Many choices are widely available and transparent. It’s the hidden codecs that still degrade audio. HD radio, most Bluetooth protocols, mobile and landline phones and the networks that interconnect them, etc. You don’t get much say in these.
- ta988 3y ago
  There is a clear advancement. You used to need an amp and large speakers with long cables to have any kind of fidelity. Now you have decent sound with really small speakers. You can even listen to music on a laptop and it doesn't suck too much. We have tiny earbuds with no cable that isolate us from the outside sounds and also have a pretty incredible sound quality compared to what we had even 20 years ago in the same form factor.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Even if we accept your claims about tiny earbuds and speakers (which I don't), the abysmally depressing fact is that we have nothing to listen to on them. All popular music has been systematically destroyed with dynamic compression since the late '90s.
    - mrob 3y ago
      You occasionally see remasters going against the trend and increasing dynamic range. Earache Records has several high dynamic range versions of classic metal albums on Bandcamp.
      - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
        That's nice to hear!
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      You might just want to stop listening to pop music. The way people engineer and mix pop music has traditionally been different from detail-oriented recordings and audiophile trappings. Before overcompression, pop music would trapeze between quiet acoustic sections and "wall of sound" crescendos that sounded awful on radio. Even further before that, fully soundstaged recordings got mixed down to mono to sound good on commodity listening hardware. There's a tenured history of making music worse to make it more widely enjoyable. The fact that the world's most popular headphones are lower-quality versions of the Earpods should tell you everything about the modern music landscape.
- dangus 3y ago
  Digital surround sound audio debuted in theaters in 1992, and DTS was released as a competitor to Dolby in 1993. You couldn’t even get movie audio at home with more than two channels 30 years ago.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Audio equipment got a thousand times better in the last decade, never mind three decades. I remember small speakers being absolutely tinny and bad in the 90's. Now the speakers in my phone kicks the butt of a medium-sized radio from that era. Hell, my HomePod is on par with the much larger and vastly more expensive B&O hifi system I had then!
blovescoffee 3y ago
They do hundreds of millions of revenue per year. I'm guessing they're comfortable with that.
- CheckSum24 3y ago
  [dead]
b112 3y ago
as our cloud devices will eventually trump smartphones. Was with you until this. Cloud? That's year 2000 talk. The "cloud" has already happened, and there's a move towards reversing this trend. With austerity measures at many companies, they're bringing stuff home. Or refusing to migrate. Cloud is stupid expensive, with very questionable value. Meanwhile, the whole node+composer+npm+etc trend is now eyed with immense wariness by many, many businesses and especially high security businesses. One dev needing a 10 line function, pulling in 2000 packages of "who knows who wrote this" and "what is the actual license here" and "my god was this repo sold to hacker $x yesterday?" and "damn, this is backdoored? how do we even audit all this stuff?" is being replaced with "just write a 100 lines of code, and don't use 1M lines of node instead!" And with the reversal and soon end of Pii as a profitable method of doing business, all those free frees are going to go away! No Pii, means no profit, means you have nothing worth value to give! And so many people I talk to, are annoyed that shows they buy, or books, or games, just vanish. People want things they can touch! They're mad at their internet connected TVs showing them ads, and spying on them. They hate online ovens and fridges and washing machines. They hate that their car sells info to the insurance company. Most people I know have had it. The cloud will always exist to some extent. But its hayday is over.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > with the reversal and soon end of Pii as a profitable method of doing business That's wishful thinking. For as much as I resist the modernization of technology, I haven't met any average-Joes with a bone to pick over the cloud. Most people don't even understand the difference between client and server anymore, let alone how much PII they leak or what the difference between browser apps is. At best, you'll get someone who says they detest surveillance but are powerless to stop it. The people I know wouldn't stop buying smartphones and Disney Plus if you doubled their price and removed every app and show that makes less than $10,000,000 annually. They are not going to meaningfully resist the cloud-ification of their favorite businesses. They admit they are trapped, and couldn't use a meaningful alternative if they tried.
  - b112 3y ago
    The trends, both legislative and case law, are towards ending this business model. I expect that within 5 years, Pii will be defunct as a legal business model.

andy99 3y ago

https://archive.md/PvZsD https://archive.md/PvZsD It's a reasonable bet to imagine society entering another aristocratic type period where we have an ultra wealthy class and a servant class like we did until WWI or so. To some extent we're already there with gig workers, but there's still more of a middle than there could be. I mean there are people who are cool paying $30 to have Starbucks delivered by people who probably barely net that in a day after gas and wear on their car.

dclowd9901 3y ago
Your inclusion of the timeline relating to WWI made me wonder how much of that war (and WWII) were about economic disparity. I found this interesting article on the topic: https://www.promarket.org/2018/01/03/inequality-imperialism-first-world-war/ https://www.promarket.org/2018/01/03/inequality-imperialism-... It seems reasonable to assume that a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it will create similar conflict both here and in space (given how many of our ultra elite are pushing into outer space for the next great fortune).
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > a similar surplus of investable funds with no where left to spend it Neither the beginning of WWI nor today are characterised with a lack of investment opportunities. If anything, economic disparity increases when investment opportunities are aplenty because that typically characterises a period of change.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- engineer_22 3y ago
  The 19th century was a period of intense social change as a result of the mastery of steam and steel. The economies of western European economies changed incredibly fast and national identities began to solidify around the identities of the people living there. The aristocratic tradition prior to the First World War was a result of an already large change from the feudal structure of pre-industrial Europe. It's interesting to try to draw parallels to the present day, but I think it's most important to remember we are participants of history and to behave as such.

el_duderino 3y ago

https://archive.is/PvZsD https://archive.is/PvZsD

lacrimacida 3y ago

At the expense of the poorest and least educated, who will desperately but their luxury goods for their status symbol. So depending on their marketing Bang&Olufsen could become the next Luis Vuiton or Gucci in their market niche

narag 3y ago
How can the poorest buy their luxury goods?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  By being bad with their money.
- capableweb 3y ago
  Via the innovation of "credit", which gets used by poor people (including me when I was poor and dumb) to purchase things you in reality can't afford.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  On credit, generally. Here's an Investopedia article about "why", which would be the natural followup question. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/091115/psychology-behind-why-people-buy-luxury-goods.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09111... That article doesn't reference Veblen goods, which seems like a relevant Wikipedia link. A Veblen good is a product, the perceived value of which is related to its price rather than its utility, in defiance of all common sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
  - narag 3y ago
    If you have credit, you're not really poor. The comment I responded to said poorest that seems even worse.
    - karaterobot 3y ago

mmaunder 3y ago

The purchase of a Rolex or Ferrari - or an incredibly overpriced sound system - is an attempt to buy a signal to others that you have taste. In fact you’re signaling how much your lack of taste is costing you. Sound gear is an excellent case in point. The studio monitors many albums are mixed on are intentionally mediocre (eg the Yamaha NS-10) to ensure it sounds great across a wide range of equipment. Even great quality studio gear is modestly priced compared to “hi fi” gear. Don’t try to buy taste. Learn about the subject and then do the work to buy or build something that is reasonably priced and outshines everything else on fundamentals, not on brand.

pentae 3y ago
For truly wealthy people their time is incredibly valuable so spending time learning about a field they are not expert in is going to be more costlier than just going out and buying a well established brand. In some cases with Rolex or Ferrari or Porsche these items can even appreciate in value.
- mmaunder 3y ago
  I think you think that price is directly proportional to quality. It's not. Luxury goods are made luxury through a process of branding, pricing, and scarcity. Rolex is an excellent case study. They've been sponsoring athletes since the early 20th century when they sponsored Mercedes Gleitze to wear an Oyster around her neck when she swam the channel. You'll continue to notice the brand at F1, premier golfing events, and so on. And when it comes to purchasing, you literally can't walk into a Rolex dealer and buy a Submariner, for example, because they are made artificially scarce. If you were able to buy a sub, you'd buy it at around $13K and then immediately be able to sell it for around $18K or more. Rolex own the luxury category when it comes to conferring value on the brand and its products. So if you can't even buy a Submariner, what the hell is the strategy? They have a much larger range of second and third-tier watches that they'll sell you then and there and once you have a "relationship" with them, they might hook you up with something worth far more on the used market the moment you buy it. It's just a big fat hustle that relies on some specific psychological triggers. It relies on what Cialdini would call "social proof", meaning that others think it's cool so you think it's cool. It also relies on scarcity conferring value on something that would otherwise be valueless. It relies on our innate desire to hero-worship, as a species, which is where sponsorship comes in. So back to the comment I'm replying to: No, thinking that a luxury brand is simply quality at a high price is far too simplistic a world-view. You can buy great quality at a very reasonable price, and if you don't have time you can employ a professional shopper. But it's not about that. It's about laziness and signaling.

zanfr 3y ago

millenials are broke; genZ will use earbuds anyway; Id rather something functional than something rpetty and useless

timeon 3y ago
> genZ will use earbuds anyway Not sure how it is with genZ in particular, but it sometimes feels like people now use speakers even when making calls in public. Which kind of sucks - not only if you need to listen to it as passer by but especially if you are on the other side of the line and someone puts you automatically on loud. I get it that phones are so big now that one can not hold them next to ear but it seems that wearing earbuds is also not popular.

_fat_santa 3y ago

I can see what B&O is getting at. It's well known that "luxury products" are largely bought by those tying to "look rich" rather than the super wealthy. Unlike say Gucci or LV that sell goods directly to consumers, a large part of B&O's business is being a supplier to things that the super rich actually do buy. I hardly ever see a standalone B&O product but where I see them the most is in high end cars. Someone that's middle class and is just trying to "look rich" is going to be buying at $400 Gucci belt or hat but the real rich folks are buying high end cars, something the middle class individual buying stuff from Gucci doesn't have the money to do. I suspect that B&O thinks that while the market for the "$400 luxury product" (ie something the middle class individual could afford) will drop off while demand for high end cars/boats and other places where they are a supplier won't be affected as much because those are inherently different customer segments.

tgtweak 3y ago
B&O has some home audio setups that are more expensive than those luxury cars with b&o upgraded sound systems (beolab 90 for example). I think they're probably not referring to their entry level b&o smart speakers when they're making this claim.

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

B&O has always been sub-par technically. The depressing thing is that even "high-end" (or at least higher-end) brands now suck. I bought an NAD receiver a while back, thinking it would be a step up from "consumer" brands... and it is an unmitigated piece of shit. So I went back to the high end of "consumer" (this time a top-of-the-line Pioneer) only to find that despite having 10 amplifiers or so in it, I can't simply have A, B, and C speaker pairs to play music in my house and yard. And incredibly there's no viable workaround. Design acumen is dead.

tgtweak 3y ago
Pioneer elite is beyond nad in terms of quality unless you're in the ultra high end.

capableweb 3y ago

> “If you go to jewellery, you have a few brands, if you go to fashion, you have a few brands, if you go to cars, you have a few brands,” he said during an interview at the new Bang & Olufsen store in London this week. “In audio luxury, there is nobody else.” If I was a worker at Bang & Olufsen, the final quote would definitely make me cringe. There is both better and more "value-for-the-money" brands that are still expensive and would be called luxury, but its marketing is aiming for audio professionals rather than "luxury consumers".

yardie 3y ago

When I met my now wife she had a Beosound Ouverture in her flat. I asked her why she would buy something so expensive and she told me it wasn't that much and it was really pretty. I think she paid like 1100£ from John Lewis. As a gearhead this was in line with what I spend for some aftermarket NISMO parts. We moved in together wanted to upgrade the system and found it was incompatible with damn near anything. We literally shelved the Beosound (literally put on a bookshelf, it is quite pretty to look at) and bought a quality hi-fi system.

LegitShady 3y ago

This is just a (bad) advertisement masquerading as journalism. Bang and Olufson won't "defy" anything or anyone.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago

They build premium speakers with a WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) that's so far off the charts, they're no longer an electronics company. Their speakers are so beautiful, it's almost better to think of them as a luxury furniture or interior design company. I think it's absolutely the right business decision for them to lean into this unfair status, and try to make their products Veblan goods like the luxury fashion houses already have.

buggeryorkshire 3y ago

B&O are weird. I used to live in Cheltenham UK where they had a store. Was helping a friend install a £40k kitchen island top and a guy from B&O came round at the same time - sharp suit, laptop, briefcase. Turned out he was out to do his 6 monthly retune of the Freeview or whatever channels on the B&O TV. Plugged the laptop into the TV, which must have been 10 years old at the time (it was one of the first fat flat screens I think), pressed some buttons then said goodbye. Some of their audio stuff was awful, form over function, especially anything with Bluetooth. But they do look nice and again from memory stuff was upgradable, so even if you paid through the arse for a portable speaker, it would support BT5 in the future or whatever.

dessant 3y ago

Through a series of unfortunate events I ended up briefly owning seven brand new Beoplay Portal PC/PS headphones in the summer of 2022, and keeping the last one that was purchased in exasperation. The products were all bought from three different authorized dealers across the EU, and despite the serial numbers and manufacturing dates being spread out, mostly all of the headphones had manufacturing deffects: - The clamping force of the headbands had considerable variation, some of the headphones were very comfortable, one fell off from your head if you looked down, while two of them caused headaches after wearing them for 20 minutes - The firmness of the foam inside the earpads and of the lambskin also had variations - Some of the products made a popping sound if you slightly pressed the cushion on the headband - The painted white L and R letters inside the earcups had various brown spots - Three headphones made a squeaking sound when you adjusted the length of the arms, one of them was also squeaking during normal use - The material of the storage bag was half as thick if the product had a later serial number - One of the products had a broken BLE module and would not connect I got some casual use out of the headphones I have kept for about 6 months, and despite treating the product like jewelry, the headband cushion material has started separating from a hidden seam. The product was quickly replaced by Bang & Olufsen. An app is required to adjust the EQ and access other features that are advertised on the sales page, but the app forces you to sign up for a B&O account and share personal information such as your name and email address, then register the product. You couldn't find any information about the requirement for account setup and product registration anywhere, not on the sales page, and not in the user manual. I believe this is at least a GDPR violation. The headphones sometimes forget the customized settings, and after a couple of months of use, the app now has a hard time connecting to the paired device. The headphones all sounded great, but from what I've read and experienced, Bang & Olufsen seems to hide shoddy manufacturing tolerances behind bespokeness, even for their most expensive products, and I doubt this is the user experience the rich are craving.

mynameisnoone 3y ago

Unfortunately, that also means their customer base is shrinking and so will their profits. But unlike brands that are passionate about their craft like say Koenigsegg, expensive trash is still trash. Their value proposition is in providing tokens to reassure the desperately insecure, the ignorant, and the tasteless. While that has economic value, they're painting themselves into a smaller and smaller corner. Fun fact: B&O CD players were used in every 90's movie as a signal of Yuppie assholes.

tim333 3y ago

As the owner of an old Linn turntable I dispute that B&O are the only player at the high end. Why not a Linn "Klimax System. A complete, integrated package with superlative sonic performance. From £105,000"? https://www.linn.co.uk/uk/full-systems https://www.linn.co.uk/uk/full-systems