Adaptive Sound Technology

- from sweet spot to sweet area

With Adaptive Sound Technology, Bang & Olufsen introduces a unique technology that radically improves your listening experience, placing you in the "sweet spot" no matter where you are in the room. Basically, this technology has the capacity to transform an entire room into one big sweet area, greatly enhancing your freedom to move around while listening to music and place your speakers wherever you want.

Adaptive Sound Technology is not a physical product; it is an ingenious software solution to a hardware problem which radically improves the home listening experience. There are two main advantages of Adaptive Sound Technology: one is the freedom to place loudspeakers arbitrarily, as most people do, without detriment to the spatial qualities of the music.

The other is the possibility of moving the sound stage wherever you want within the loudspeaker perimeter, thus having multiple listening positions such as the living room couch, a favourite chair and the dining room table. These could all be facing different directions, yet the sound will appear in front of the listener, who experiences to be always placed right in the "sweet spot."

Adaptive Sound Technology compensates for the less than optimal placement of loudspeakers in a room, and provides better listening comfort by enabling you to take the sound stage with you to different locations in your room, instead of having to stay in a static sweet spot. You have full flexibility as any type of active BeoLab loudspeaker in the current range can be combined in the system, but the quality of the experience will be improved proportionally with the number of loudspeakers involved.

The interior challenge

In a normal loudspeaker setup, the spatial attributes of the music will suffer if either of the loudspeakers or the listener is positioned improperly. This is true regardless of the quality or type of loudspeaker or the qualities of the room. The problem is that in most cases either all or some of the loudspeakers are placed wherever convenient for the interior decoration. Also, the design of the room might not be suited for a setup with the optimal sweet spot, or you may have a large room where you wish to have more locations for listening to your music or movie sound. Sometimes you may want to fill the entire room with music, and sometimes you may want to focus the sound on part of the room.

With Adaptive Sound Technology, Bang & Olufsen uses the BeoLab loudspeakers that you choose, in the positions you want them, to simulate the sound that you would have heard if you had set up your loudspeakers in an acoustically ideal position. In other words, you can decide exactly where you would like to place the loudspeakers and the sound, and still hear the spatial placement of instruments that the recording artist intended.

One touch superb sound

With the Beo5 remote you can make presets for different listening locations, and change from one location to another by the touch of a button. In this way, it is possible to have one preset for watching movies on the couch, another preset for sitting at the dining table, and a third for a dedicated listening in your favourite chair. In all cases, you can place the sound stage right in front of you for a magical, personal and truly customized solution.

Finally, Adaptive Sound Technology further enhances your listening experience by playing back the signal through all of your selected loudspeakers no matter whether you listen to mono, stereo, or 5.1 channels. Consequently, even a fairly unimpressive recording can sound fantastic, if played back through seven loudspeakers working together.

Adaptive Sound Technology will initially be introduced in the BeoVision 4 plasma TV, and all BeoSystem 3 based video products including BeoVision 9 and the BeoVision 7 series.