Setting up your Bang & Olufsen speakers

We have installed Bang & Olufsen for over a decade. Here is how we set them up — and why the same speaker can sound merely good or genuinely unforgettable.

Placement before power

Distance from the wall, height to the listening position, what the first reflection hits — placement decides more than any setting. We move a speaker in ten-centimeter steps and listen; the right spot announces itself.

The app, tamed

Multiroom is magic once rooms are named sensibly, groups are preset, and everyone’s phone behaves the same way. Five minutes of setup discipline saves five hundred “how do I…” moments.

A Beolab out of the box is excellent. A Beolab dialed to the room is unforgettable.

Calibration: the ten minutes that matter

Active room compensation measures how your room misbehaves and corrects for it. It ships in the speaker — most owners never run it. We always do, and it is the step people call “the moment it clicked.”