'The Voices Rendered So Well, It's Like They're in the Room with You' – the $4,700 Bang & Olufsen Beosound Premiere Is Worth Every Cent for Bringing Music and Movies to Life

After weeks spent reviewing the Beosound Premiere, a $4,700 Bang & Olufsen offering, I can confirm that if you're after the best possible sound from a single bar, this is the one to choose. It also makes for a real audio statement for your home.

Testing it against our standardised list of films, TV scenes, and songs, the question isn't whether it sounds good. It's whether it sounds almost $5,000 good.

Here's how it stacked up against the best soundbars on the market.

My One-Minute Verdict

The Beosound Premiere is one of the most sonically standout soundbars I've ever tested, which is somewhat of a relief given its high price.

It has a 7.1.4 channel configuration, which means it has seven main speakers, one subwoofer channel, and four up-firing speakers. This bounces sound off your ceiling in a way that creates genuine height and makes whatever you're listening to feel truly surround and immersive.

Dialogue is crisp, action scenes have weight, and music sounds full and spatially rich in a way that few single soundbars can match. This is undoubtedly because of B&O's Wide Stage technology that uses beam-forming to create the illusion of speakers beyond the bar itself.

Physical setup is simple – it's essentially plug-and-play via HDMI eARC – even if the boxes are surprisingly heavy and awkward. Sadly, the digital experience didn't match. The B&O app looks the part but ultimately feels clunky, especially when switching between inputs. There's also no remote control in the box.

The assumption is that you'll just use the app as the control, but when the app falls short, the whole experience falls short, and at this price, it's disappointing. There is, however, a separate Beoremote One that you can add to your setup for $400.

Elsewhere, the design is most definitely an acquired taste. Up close, the natural aluminium and workmanship are beautiful and bold, but from afar, it borders on imposing and industrial. It's also oversized. For some people, this will be exactly what they want and expect from a statement piece, for others (me included), it's too much.

Room-filling sound won't come from a small and subtle speaker, but if you want something slightly less expensive with similarly impressive performance, the $1,099 Sonos Arc Ultra, which delivers exceptional surround sound at a lower price point, and the Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar, which offers hyper-realistic surround sound and a similarly sleek design for around $899.

Beosound Premiere: Specifications

Beosound Premiere: Setup

There is nothing small or subtle about the Beosound Premiere. Not only is the box so heavy I couldn't lift it on my own – something to bear in mind if you live in an upstairs apartment or similar – but its length makes it awkward to open and navigate. The wooden cover we were sent with our review sample came in a box of its own, too, to add to the packaging and bulk.

Once you get inside, however, unboxing is both easy and luxurious. There's no plastic anywhere, making it a sustainable design choice. Everything is sleek, considered, and presented in soft material bags in a way that feels entirely in keeping with the high price tag. Inside you'll find the soundbar, an HDMI cable, a LAN cable, a mains cable, and a polishing cloth.

I didn't have space to mount the soundbar below my TV, which experts claim is the best soundbar placement, but everything I would have needed for mounting is also in the box, including the brackets, a drilling template, and a hex screwdriver. Just bear in mind that the soundbar weighs 18.7lbs (8.5kg), so it's unlikely to be a one-person job. You'll also need to make sure your wall can take this weight.

The Beosound Premiere connects to your TV via HDMI eARC, which is the enhanced version of the standard Audio Return Channel. It also means it can handle high-quality audio formats like Dolby Atmos.

Once connected, sound started coming through almost immediately. Having had many soundbars, particularly from Samsung, in the past, which required some fiddly selecting of sources and so on, the ease with which the Premiere was installed was a highlight.

The B&O app then guides you through what's called a Room Compensation calibration. As part of this, the soundbar emits a series of tones to analyse the acoustics of your space and optimise the sound accordingly. This only took a few minutes and led to truly immersive sound.

The one thing missing from the box is a remote control. B&O assumes most users will control everything through the app or the touch strip along the top of the bar. This works well enough (albeit far from brilliantly) day-to-day, but for almost $5,000, the absence feels like an oversight.

You can buy B&O's Beoremote One separately, but it'll cost you an additional $450 (£400) on top of what you've already paid.

In total, setup took no longer than 10 minutes and most of that was the calibration stage.

Beosound Premiere: Design and Features

I've tested dozens of soundbars in my time, and the Beosound Premiere is one of the most striking I've ever had in my living room. Made from pure aluminium and said to have been precision-formed at B&O's Factory 5 in Struer, Denmark, it's definitely not designed to blend in.

The natural aluminium finish has a matte satin quality that catches light without being distracting. It's available in Gold Tone and Black Anthracite; I tested the latter, which blended perfectly against my integrated TV stand. Each finish can be paired with an optional oak or grey fabric speaker cover (sold separately), meaning there's scope to match it to your interior rather than working around it. More on that below.

The design and shape are bold at best; industrial at worst. At 36.7in wide and 6.7in tall, it's substantial and will obscure the bottom portion of most TV screens if placed on the same shelf.

The centrally-mounted up-firing driver sits behind an aluminium grille, and LEDs glow softly inside the bar as you adjust the volume or other settings. It's a nice touch, but if you prefer a cleaner look, you can buy an optional oak or fabric grille for anadditional $1,200 and $325, respectively. Alternatively, if you want the sound quality but not this design at all, there are several ways you can hide your soundbar.

Inside, 10 custom speaker drivers are arranged across seven internal channels: Left, centre, and right front-firing drivers, left and right side-firing drivers, and left and right up-firing drivers – all powered by 580 watts of Class D amplification.

That's a serious amount of hardware packed into a single bar, which explains why it's so large. It also explains why, when paired with B&O's proprietary Wide Stage beam-forming technology, the sound is so much wider and taller than you'd expect. This setup creates the impression of multiple speakers and offers one of the most immersive consumer surround sound formats I've seen.

Control is handled primarily through the B&O app, which comes with five pre-defined sound modes, fully customisable EQ settings, and a Room Compensation feature that analyses your space and adjusts the sound to suit. On face value, this app looks clean and well-designed, but the problem is using it day-to-day.

Switching between your TV audio and a streaming source like TIDAL or Spotify requires more steps than it should, and some controls are buried in locations that aren't obvious until you've spent time hunting for them.

For a soundbar you're operating primarily through an app, that friction adds up. It doesn't matter how good the tools are if you can't find them.

If you want to avoid the app or reduce how much you use it, a touch strip along the top of the bar handles volume, playback, and input switching in a much more intuitive way, and is enough control for daily use. It's also worth noting that there's no support for smart home assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant built in, which feels like an oversight for such an expensive appliance and would have been another welcome alternative to the app.

If your living room ideas lean toward the minimal or traditional, this bar makes a strong statement that not everyone will want. But if you're the kind of person who treats a beautiful object as a design feature in its own right – and who wants it to also deliver Dolby Atmos 7.1.4, 580 watts of amplification, and the full range of streaming services – the Premiere will look and feel outstanding.

Beosound Premiere: Sound (TV and Movies)

As soon as you start using the Beosound Premiere, you forgive a lot of design and usability flaws and can see (or more accurately, hear) where all of your money has gone.

The first thing I noticed was the directional audio. During the confrontation between Walt and Hank in Breaking Bad, I could hear exactly where each voice was positioned in the on-screen garage, and the acoustics of the space came through in a way I rarely pick up on other systems.

In fact, there's nuance to the dialogue I wasn't even aware existed, and when Hank lowered his voice, I leaned in as if I was there. There's no muddiness or compression: just two voices rendered so well it's like they're in the room with you, and this is the kind of clarity that makes you realise how much you've been missing on your TV speakers.

That clarity doesn't disappear when things get loud either. Every noise in the New York battle sequence in Avengers: Infinity War, which remains one of the busiest scenes I use for sound testing, was distinct even at its most chaotic. Even the voices. Sounds moved above and around me, so much so that they made me jump on a couple of occasions. B&O's Wide Stage beam-forming earns its keep here in a way that's immediately noticeable.

What impressed me most, though, was how consistently the Beosound Premiere held this performance across very different material. Princess Mononoke couples orchestral music with sudden bursts of action, and the bar handled the contrast well.

For the fight sequences in John Wick: Chapter 2, the bar showed off all the layers with ease. Our Planet then showcased the Premiere's ability to shift from dramatic to intimate within the same scene, and David Attenborough's narration was even more soothing than it normally is, and that's saying something.

For late-night viewing, or once my youngest was in bed in the room above our living space, B&O's Night Mode does a good job of softening bigger sounds while keeping dialogue clear. If that's something your household needs, our guide on using night mode on soundbars is worth a look before your next movie night.

My partner and I have very different opinions on what the optimal volume for our TV is. I prefer it quiet and can hear dialogue well. He prefers everything loud and struggles with voices. The biggest compliment I could give the Beosound Premiere is that throughout every single TV and movie test, we didn't disagree once. The soundbar handled both ends of the spectrum so well and consistently that we were both happy, and I've never been able to say that.

Beosound Premiere: Sound (Music)

I wasn't expecting the Beosound Premiere to be as good at music as it is at TV and movies. Single soundbars often sacrifice one for the other, but this one doesn't.

I started low, with Massive Attack's Angel. The bass sat exactly where it should without bleeding into the midrange, while the subtle use of percussion came through clearly. Daft Punk's Phoenix, which pushed the electronic end harder with kick drums, synth highs, and cymbals, sounded properly separated. None of the ranges collapsed into each other.

Sade's Feel No Pain sits in the midrange almost entirely, and voices on lesser systems can sound thin or slightly nasal when there's nothing dramatic happening around them. Here, Sade's voice came to the front and transformed the whole of my living space with warm music. Similarly, the old, low-fidelity recording of Leonard Cohen's Suzanne was equally charming and true-to-life. The bar didn't flatter it or artificially brighten it. It just played it honestly, which is harder than it sounds.

The treble tests were where I had a small reservation. Robber by The Weather Station exposed a very slight hardness at the top end. Nothing that would stop me listening, but noticeable on material that largely lives up there. Pitch the Baby by Cocteau Twins, which is almost entirely pure treble with electronically altered vocals, confirmed this. The Premiere is exceptional across the bass and midrange, and very good in the highs, but it isn't quite perfect once it gets up there.

For a soundbar that most people will use primarily for TV, the music performance here is a genuine bonus. Like with the encompassing nature of TV and movie audio, the Premiere makes music fill the room, and Adele's Set Fire to the Rain was the best example of this. If you want one system to do everything and are willing to pay for the privilege, the Premiere makes a compelling case for itself.

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