Savour International

The elite group of high-end stereo system manufactures make superb products that provide the best sound reproduction available on the planet.

The six by four metre listening room is windowless, with a few bookshelves casually mounted on its white walls, a red sofa, and a few chairs with red upholstery installed in front of a grey curtain that acts as a room divider.

The visitor, somewhat taken aback by all this, takes his place in this seating area and waits for the performance to begin. And suddenly sounds emerge from behind the curtain – sounds whose power is enchanting, magical. First there’s some blues, then a bit of pop music, and finally classical music played by a large symphony orchestra. Just like a choir of angels. The visitor is asked to guess what is behind the curtain, and what kind of stereo he’s listening to.

Acoustics engineer Jens Rahbek, a gaunt man in his mid-50s and dressed all in black, moves the curtain aside. And what you see are not, as you would expect, large speakers but rather two cubes with rounded edges, no larger than a handball, that would fit comfortably into any living room. Mr. Rahbek later tells me that each week a select group of 12 of the company’s roughly 2,000 employees is invited here to listen to music – employees whose listening sensibilities have been honed by attending large concerts and who are asked to sample the sounds of the company’s new products. For the quantifiable acoustic properties of a stereo is one thing, but the subjective experience of listening to it is quite another. And only actual human listeners can reliably assess that.

Bang & Olufsen pays close attention to the human factor. The company “fine tunes” its employees, whom CEO Karl “Kalle” Kristian Hvidt Nielsen, 46, refers to as “humanists” by which he means “anthropologists, people who understand others, who understand our customers, and who thus have the ability to figure out what brings our customers joy.”

The desire to make fine art out of sound is the raison d’être of Denmark-based Bang & Olufsen, whose head office is located in Struer on a windblown site in Northern Jutland between sheep-runs and Limfjord-Sund.

Founded in 1925, Bang & Olufsen is the market leader in the high-end stereo segment. The company’s main mission is to enable people of means (admittedly an elite group) to enjoy the best stereo sounds obtainable anywhere on the planet – best here meaning precise, undistorted and pure.

High-end applies to receivers, amplifiers, subwoofers, speakers, and, of course, old-fashioned turntables, such as those purveyed by the Switzerland-based company Thorens. All of these products provide outstanding sound quality, thanks to the tremendous technical sophistication that goes into them. And while we’re on the subject of taste: high-end stereos are to standard hi-fi systems as Grands Crus Bordeaux wines are to vin de pays.

As with wine, increasing numbers of connoisseurs are discovering the subtleties of superior products – and not only for when they’re at home, but also on the go. And so Bang & Olufsen provides outstanding sound systems for Mercedes, Aston Martins, and high-end luxury models, and will soon be doing likewise for BMWs.

1 | The company’s Trio spherical horn system with a bass horn sound, reaches the limits of the possible. Price: €102,000.
2 | Founded in 1925 and now headed by Karl “Kalle” Kristian Hvidt Nielsen, Denmarkbased Bang & Olufsen makes superior quality home stereo systems.

3 | Bang & Olufsen’s elegant Beolab 11 bass speaker is tulip-shaped and has an aluminium casing. The company has always placed great emphasis on striking designs.

The sound of luxury on luxury yachts

Berlin-based Burmester now also offers superlative sound systems for luxury cars. The company outfitted 330 Bugatti Veyrons with pricey stereos, and is currently in the process of doing likewise, to the tune of a 16-speaker system, for the Porsche Cayenne and the Porsche Panamera. Price: €4,500.

Burmester provides sound systems for ships as well. Recently, a Burmester subcontractor installed such systems in two luxury yachts (one 120 metres, the other 160 metres long) – although the company will not disclose the owners’ names, apart from indicating that the customers were the “usual suspects”.

The company’s founder, Dieter Burmester, 64, set up the company in no-man’s land between the Tempelhof and Schöneberg districts, just north of the new Südkreuz train station.On the upper level of an elongated commercial building, Burmester’s fifty employees make the company’s products in a large, light-flooded space.

Burmester, a licensed engineer, native of Lower Saxony, former rock band guitarist and erstwhile medical technology expert, has been making superb stereo systems and components since 1977, with the aim of “enabling music lovers to forget that they’re listening to music via technical equipment”.

Burmester defines “high end” as follows: “If you want to reproduce the sound of a large symphony orchestra in a living room, you need a specific dynamic ranging from the very lowest to the very loudest sounds; and to do this, you need a certain level of technical performance. Without this, the sound doesn’t feel right, and the listener doesn’t feel good, and turns the volume down. But with a good stereo system, you often need to turn the volume up.” A veritable feast for the ears.

But the visual aspect counts too. Like all high-end stereo manufacturers, Burmester places great importance on using the finest materials, on impeccable craftsmanship, and superb designs that are technoid, unornamented, and devoid of bells and whistles – although, of course, this doesn’t prevent the company from using the occasional 24-carat gold-plated front plate in lieu of the minimalist polished chrome plate. For it seems that customers from Arabic countries like their stereos a bit flashier, and high-end stereo system makers are players in the global luxury market.