Bang & Olufsen Celebrates 100 Years with $211K+ Beolab 90 Titan Edition Speakers

The Danish brand Bang & Olufsen has a well-deserved reputation for making stylish and expensive audio gear that sometimes blurs the line between “lifestyle” and high-performance. The company’s new Beosound Premiere Dolby Atmos soundbar is utterly gorgeous, but the $5,800 price tag might give you pause. The larger Theatre model costs $13,600 and up, and these costly soundbar products are just the tip of the audio iceberg. 

Whenever B&O reaches a significant milestone, the brand goes all out to celebrate, resulting in some fascinating products, albeit at extreme prices. In 2015, when B&O celebrated its 90th anniversary, the company launched the Beolab 90, a large and complex active speaker that represented the pinnacle of its acoustic innovation wrapped in bespoke industrial craftsmanship. Now in 2025, to celebrate 100 years, B&O has unveiled the new Beolab 90 Titan Edition, a bold reimagining of its flagship speaker. This new speaker “merges technical brilliance with sculptural elegance,” according to Bang & Olufsen, combining the advanced DSP and beam-forming technologies of the original Beolab 90 with exclusive materials and special surface finishes dreamed up by the company’s Atelier customization department. 

Beolab 90 Original Version

Like its predecessor, the new Beolab 90 Titan Edition is a fully active design driven by a dedicated amplification and processing architecture unlike anything else out there. (See James Larsen’s AXPONA 2017 show report for his impressions of the original Beolab 90.) This highly unusual speaker is capable of delivering precise “sweet-spot imaging,” or a full 360-degree sound-field for parties, all without sacrificing the transparency and power that audiophiles seek in traditional 2-channel systems. At the heart of the system is a powerful a DSP engine that individually controls the 18 drivers in each speaker, all made by Scan-Speak, another Danish audio specialist. The driver array includes seven 1-inch tweeters, seven 4.5-inch midrange drivers, a trio of 10-inch woofers, and a single front-facing 13-inch woofer. These state-of-the-art drivers are placed in carefully defined positions for maximum performance, and each is powered by its own amp. Each speaker includes 14 channels of ICEpower amplification (at 300 watts/channel) and 4 channels of class D Heliox amplification (at 1000 watts/channel), for a ridiculous total of 8,200 watts per speaker. The original Beolab 90 weighed in at 302 pounds apiece, and was capable of delivering bass down to 12 Hz. We’re still awaiting specs for the new Titan Edition, but they should be similar.

As mentioned above, the drivers are all facing in different directions. There are three front drivers on each speaker — one tweeter, one midrange driver, and the aforementioned 13-inch woofer. Together these compose a relatively straightforward three-way system pointed directly at the main listening position. The speaker’s DSP engine provides a phase-correct, three-way digital crossover for this system. So far, so normal. But there are another 15 drivers per loudspeaker, and the output of these depends upon a variety of settings that make up the speaker’s Advanced Sound Features. These features work together to control not only the speaker’s frequency response, but also its radiation pattern throughout the audio-band, effectively minimizing the listening room’s influence on the direct sound from the speakers.

The first ingredient of this complex digital and acoustical recipe is Active Room Compensation, which acoustically optimizes the sound by analyzing the room to adjust for speaker placement, as well as walls and furniture. Unlike conventional room correction solutions, which apply individual filters for the Left and Right speakers, the Beolab’s Active Room Compensation also filters to correct the speakers’ summed output, and the difference between their outputs. This works in conjunction with Adaptive Bass Linearization to deliver the best possible sound in any environment.

Next, the speakers use beam-forming tech to deliver a feature called Beam Width Control, which gives the user the ability to control sound dispersion. A “Narrow” Beam Width setting offers precise delivery to a particular listening position — like the typical audiophile “sweet-spot” but on digital and electronic steroids. The “Wide” Beam Width setting is perfect for movies, according to B&O, while the 360-degree omnidirectional sound setting is designed for parties.

At the Narrow setting — what might be called the “audiophile” Beam Width mode — each driver gets a highly specialized, bandwidth-limited, phase-controlled signal that has one task: to interact with the acoustic output of the three front drivers, so as to redefine the BeoLab 90’s off-axis radiation at all frequencies. Thus, each of (the additional) 15 drivers will be summing or interfering with the off-axis radiation at different frequencies, to reshape the dispersion to be uniformly controlled over most of the audio-band — much as a sculptor might add clay at one place and remove it at another.

— Kalman Rubinson, Stereophile

Finally, the Beam Direction Control feature was created for “flexible living spaces,” according to Bang & Olufsen, to “ensure you always have a front row seat,” no matter where you are relative to the speakers. The Beam Direction Control technology lets you define one of five directions as the acoustic “front,” giving you a “tailored sweet spot listening experience” that isn’t confined to one specific listening position.

Bang & Olufsen Beolab 90 Titan Edition: Aesthetic Design

The Beolab 90 Titan Edition is built around a custom main cabinet, made from over 140 pounds of solid aluminum. Here B&O has ditched the semi-transparent black fabric “sails” that adorn the original Beolab 90, focusing instead on a hand-sandblasted aluminum finish, made using fine particles from crushed volcanic rock to produce a “raw yet elegant texture” that shows off both the material itself and the naked Scan-Speak drivers. The raw and exposed structural core of the speaker is contrasted with the speaker’s polished base panels, giving the illusion of levitation, according to Bang & Olufsen. It’s a far-out look, and one that is certainly less ambiguous about its purpose than the original Beolab 90, which most people would not readily identify as a loudspeaker. That speaker’s unusual, yet graceful, fabric forms are replaced in the Titan Edition by sleek, precision-carved metal.

But the unusual shape and the overall attention to detail make the Beolab 90 Titan Edition a successful design, in my opinion — it does not emanate the all-work-and-no-play vibes that make some metallic speakers an eyesore. Every detail, from the precision-engineered fittings to the delicate aluminum rings around the woofers, appears refined and carefully considered. While the original Beolab 90 featured a top tower made from 10mm-thick cast plastic, the Titan Edition appears to be an all-metal affair. The “face mask” at the top of each speaker is precision-milled from a single block of solid aluminum in a process that reportedly takes 12 hours. The fine machine grooves surrounding every driver are “milled to radiate like sonic ripples, creating a visual echo of sound waves,” according to B&O. We’re told that the top lid of the speaker is meticulously machined to “evoke the glow of a lighthouse.” Other fine touches include uniquely-crafted fasteners, light-passing aperture holes, and laser-engraved detailing.

For 100 years, innovation and design have been at the heart of Bang & Olufsen. The Beolab 90 Titan Edition pays homage to our iconic, flagship speaker — a product that has shaped much of our acoustic philosophy. But more than a celebration of our legacy, this edition showcases a level of craftsmanship and bespoke capability that only Bang & Olufsen can create. It is a bold statement of what’s possible when artistry, technology, and vision converge.

— Kristian Teär, CEO of Bang & Olufsen

More to Come From B&O

Bang & Olufsen says that the Beolab 90 Titan Edition is just the first in a series of five “exclusive creations” that will celebrate the brand’s 100th anniversary. There will be four more limited-edition Beolab 90 products revealed over the coming months, “each one a distinct interpretation of the Beolab 90, designed to captivate collectors and connoisseurs alike,” according to the company.  A pair of the standard Beolab 90 speakers will currently set you back a heart-stopping $211,800 — up from around $85K per pair when they first launched. While only a fortunate few will ever be in the position to own speakers like the Beolab 90, this kind of technology is worth seeking out just to see and hear what is possible when skilled and imaginative engineers are given a blank check.

More information: Bang & Olufsen

Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.