Bang & Olufsen Beolink Multiroom Being Discontinued.

The newest Bang & Olufsen speaker, the Beosound Balance, caused a stir in the Bang & Olufsen community, but not for the usual reasons of excellent audio quality and high design.  It is the first high end Bang & Olufsen speaker to not support the Beolink Multiroom system.

For the uninitiated, Bang & Olufsen were the pioneers of multi-room music systems.  20 years ago, when the idea of having the same song in different rooms meant having several people timing the pressing of a play button in each room, they created Beolink, a system which funnily enough, still stands up against competitors, as it allows different songs to be played in different rooms on different devices.  It is proprietary, and only applies to B&O products, and for the foreseeable future, it will not be part of Bang & Olufsen's product range.

The rumour mill started churning as soon as the Balance was released, and it has been confirmed by Bang & Olufsen in a press release.  In another press release which was discussed on a podcast by Bang & Olufsen of Manchester, the idea of "exciting new technologies" was discussed, but frankly this is clearly a PR exercise, and pretty similar to B&O's policy of "wait & see" which has been irritating customers for years.

We can understand the decision, in a world where it's so much easier and cheaper to use Airplay, Chromecast and other music sending technologies for wireless music sending, why bother to go to the expense of a unique proprietary one with separate app support?   The problem is Bang & Olufsen have made a huge error of judgement here, and they know it because they have released a massive promotional campaign on how great and easy music sending is with their devices with no mention of Beolink.

You see, people buy Bang & Olufsen because they were a breed apart, unsurpassed quality of audio, and the pinnacle of design.  In the environment of "just make it look good", the new guard at B&O have forgotten this, and focused on marketing.  B&O to the people in charge now is nothing more than "another high end audio maker".  Thats not what it was, it was Bang & Olufsen.  The best  The one and only.  People used to dream of owning it.  It may be too late to save the brand, but we have definitely lost Beolink. RIP Beolink, lets hope its not RIP B&O.