There’s pricey. There’s expensive. And then there’s a speaker that’s costs so much it could probably rival the budget allocated to a Beyonce World Tour + Private Jet Transportation combined.
To mark its Martin Place flagship opening and a hundred years in business, Bang & Olufsen has rolled out a release that unabashedly falls into the latter, and dropped the Beolab 90 Titan Edition – a loudspeaker so exclusive and so absurdly engineered, that it costs $760,000. Per speaker. Not per pair. Per speaker. There are 10 in the entire world, and Australia, somewhat miraculously, has one of them. Renaissance World Tour money, basically, just to play the Renaissance album.
“We never get anything fun in Australia,” one team member admitted candidly ahead of the launch. “They always leave us out, so it’s good to have.” Finally, a limited edition that actually made it past customs.
A Century in the Making (And, Apparently, Several Flights of Stairs)
The Martin Place store marks Bang & Olufsen’s second Sydney flagship and fifth in Australia, landing inside a heritage sandstone building at 14 Martin Place that the brand spent years trying to make work.
General Manager Julian Kipping is refreshingly honest that “it takes a long time to find the right spot” – though he insists “as soon as I walked into 14 Martin Place, it just felt right from the moment we got in.” Right, perhaps, but not exactly easy: no vehicle access, noise restrictions on a store literally designed around sound (“go figure that, right?” he laughed), and heritage compliance that gave him a crash course in old-building bureaucracy he never signed up for. There were also steps. Many, many steps. “This place had steps, which I really truly regret right now,” Kipping admitted – presumably while eyeing off the $760,000 speaker being carried up them. Somewhere, Beyonce’s stage crew felt that on a spiritual level.
Even the size of the place fought back. “It’s quite a compact area,” he conceded, “but it just felt like something we should do and something we should try. To be honest, we couldn’t be happier with the result. It’s been fantastic.” He’s also generous with the credit, tipping his hat to store manager Jeremy Thomas for pulling it off in what was, by Kipping’s own account, entirely new territory for him: “New environment for him in terms of building stores and he’s done a great job and produced a great result.”
The result is a genuinely striking three-level sensory journey – reception in moody blue and red, an earthy Atelier living room on level two, and a green-toned VIP listening room and bar up top, all wrapped in warm Scandinavian styling against the building’s original stone facade. Kipping puts it plainly: “I think it’s really fitting that a brand like Bang & Olufsen deserves to be in the city centre along with all the other luxury global brands of the world.” No arguments here.
The timing makes sense – Bang & Olufsen turned 100 last year, and the brand clearly still rides the birthday high. GOT7’s Mark Tuan turned up to help them celebrate the Sydney opening, because nothing says “century of understated Danish elegance” quite like a K-pop cameo. Beyonce wasn’t there in person, but given what’s about to happen to her bassline, she was arguably the guest of honour anyway.
Enter the Titan (Insurance Not Included)
If the store is the venue, the Beolab 90 Titan Edition is very much the headline act – and it knows it. Store manager Michael Cameron doesn’t so much sell the speaker as calmly recite facts that sound like a sales pitch anyway. “This is our flagship speaker,” he says, before explaining the Titan Edition is “completely stripped back to show you the raw power and performance underneath.” It’s “kind of brutal industrial design,” he admits, “but finished in that elegant way that only Bang & Olufsen can.” Precision-milled aluminium faceplates, each taking roughly 14 hours to produce. “Each speaker is handcrafted, built by hand in Denmark, specifically for the BLF90s,” he adds – because apparently even the assembly line was too pedestrian for this thing.
Inside sits a 12-inch subwoofer, three 10-inch subwoofers, seven mid-range drivers and seven tweeters, all “working in tandem to make sure that you have the best performance, no matter what size, shape or room, or where your listening positions are.” Considerate, really, given the room probably cost almost as much as the speaker.
Cameron isn’t shy about the superlatives, either. “The performance of these is unmatched in the world, and you’ll often hear Julian refer to them as the best speakers in the world,” he says, before adding with a grin, “Slightly biased. I have a tendency to agree with him.” A claim that would sound more modest coming from anyone who wasn’t about to play Beyonce through it.
The demo does some heavy lifting to back that up. On a live guitar recording, Cameron points out “you really get this spectacular clarity, not only from strings being plucked, but you can hear the guitarist’s finger actually running down the strings” – right down to “every little ridge of the high bass strings.” On another track, he promises that if you’re sitting in the right spot, “it will sound like [the artist is] just standing there singing directly to you.” High praise, and also a genuinely unsettling image for $760,000 – especially once Queen Bey enters the chat.
Because enter she does. Reaching for Partition to close out the demo, Cameron grins: “Bass performance wise, if you don’t like your neighbours, this is one sure-fire way to get them to move out.” It’s hard to imagine a more fitting test track – a $760,000 speaker finally getting to flex on a song about flexing. Somewhere in Martin Place, a very expensive apartment building is about to have a very expensive, Beyoncé-shaped problem.
Back to Kipping for the closing argument, and it’s a genuinely poetic one, marketing spend notwithstanding: “I think many loudspeakers, most loudspeakers, produce music,” he says. “The BLM 90 Titan Edition reveals it. A vocalist will appear in the room, figuratively speaking. An orchestra will fill the space. You’ll stop listening to speakers, and you’ll start experiencing music.” Presumably the vocalist he has in mind is, once again, Beyoncé. He’d know his stuff, too – he launched the original a decade ago at the Sydney Opera House, and still describes it as witnessing “something truly revolutionary.” Ten years on, his verdict on the design holds up too: “This shape was not designed for fashion, yet 10 years later it still looks as good.” Somewhat fittingly, so does she.
Whether it’s actually worth the price of a modest Sydney apartment is, admittedly, a question only ten people on the planet get to weigh in on. The rest of us will just have to trust them – and possibly petition Beyonce to confirm whether hers has arrived yet.
More Than Just an Extremely Expensive Speaker
The Titan Edition isn’t travelling alone. The opening also debuts a collaboration between Bang & Olufsen and Australian artist Holly Terry, who’s reimagined the brand’s sculptural Beosound A9 through her signature bold, abstract style as the latest instalment of the brand’s “Art of the A9” series. The “Sydney Edition” piece launches exclusively at Martin Place before a nationwide rollout – a considerably more attainable way to own a piece of the celebration, and one that doesn’t require a conversation with your accountant beforehand (or a co-sign from Jay-Z).
A Beyonce-Approved Bottom Line
At $760,000, the Bang & Olufsen Beolab 90 Titan Edition isn’t a speaker most of us will ever own. It’s a design statement that costs more than a Queen Bey world tour outfit, and arguably the most expensive way in the country to test whether your neighbours actually like you. But as a symbol of a hundred years spent refusing to compromise on sound, design or ambition, it’s hard to argue Bang & Olufsen picked the wrong way to celebrate.
Unless your name is Beyonce Knowles, you (probably) can’t buy one. But you can absolutely go stand in front of it in Martin Place, look, and appreciate that somewhere, someone thought “$760,000 speaker” and simply nodded along – and somewhere else, BK nodded right back.
