Bang & Olufsen’s BeoSound 5

BeoSound 5 is a lifstyle device which is perfect for the living room. It gives the natural experience of holding the album covers in hand. BeoSound 5 have a sturdy and welcoming aluminium navigation cylinder for direct and easy interaction with the songs and albums, which are shown impressively on the screen. The main interface of BeoSound 5 is a 2.65kg table-top or wall-mounted remote dominated by a 10.4-inch 1024 x 768 LCD and an aluminium scroll wheel.

Built with one of the best signal processing, BeoSound 5 supports playback of WMA, WMA Lossless, MP3, WAV, ASF and AAC, together with internet radio streams in WMA, MP3, ASX and M3U with connections on the BeoMaster 5 including B&O MasterLink, IR input, analog line-out, S/PDIF output, DVI-I, DVI-D (for the controller), YPbPr, S-Video, Composite video, three USB 2.0 ports (one for the controller) and ethernet. BeoMaster 5 is a black box containing storage for up to one thousand CDs (500GB music server) in lossless quality. It also consists of important sockets for internet radio, managing music via your computer, showing photos on BeoVision, and playing multi room music via BeoLink. It also shows video in MPEG, MPE, MPG, AVI, WMV and VFW formats.

BeoSound 5 has a unique feature of analysing the sound, dynamics, rhythmic aspects etc. to find More Of the same kind of music from the collection. Therefore every time a song ends, it is followed automatically by another that matches it harmoniously, unless choosen otherwise. The whole system runs MOTS (More Of The Same), B&O’s new intelligent playlist system.

BeoSound 5 runs on Windows XP Embedded and is priced roughly around £3,500 ($5,377).