The same certainly holds true for the Beolab 90 speaker system. First introduced in 2015 and originally designed by André Poulheim of Studio Noto, the speaker has now been supercharged by B&O’s in-house design team (lead by Kresten Bjørn Krab-Bjerre) as an even more visually uncompromising object that treats sound equipment less as background appliance than as a full-blown presence. The two new editions, Monarch and Zenith, quite literally put the “bang” back into speaker design, through a level of material finish that feels closer to sculpture than hi-fi equipment.
Monarch is the warmer of the pair, layering the speaker’s body with angled and curved rosewood lamellas alongside six wooden knots, ochre-toned aluminum crowns, and semi-transparent fabric panels that partially reveal the drivers beneath. Zenith is the cooler drama queen of the two, with six curved panels, each carrying 289 anodized aluminum spheres in seven pearl-inspired tones, creating a skin that shifts subtly with light, movement, and sound. The pearl-blasted dark-gray facemask is meant to evoke an oyster shell, while a circular mother-of-pearl inlay on the top lid pushes things into maritime fantasy. If Monarch nods to mid-century Danish furniture craft, Zenith leans into something more atmospheric and almost otherworldly: part precision-machined object, part luminous shell.