Beosound Explore, because pulling a Bang & Olufsen bijou speaker from your bag at a picnic or party is hard to beat.
The Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore continues the company’s tradition. Think of B&O and you probably imagine futuristic satellite-shaped speakers that you can physically roll to increase volume, premium hi-fi systems that double as art installations, dark and somewhat foreboding 8200-watt monolithic speakers comprising 18 drivers, or TVs that unfurl just like a butterfly showing off its wings – yes, these are all real B&O products.
At the more compact and portable end of the scale however, B&O is still a player, making our best Bluetooth speakers guide more strikingly beautiful and otherworldly with every release – and the Beosound Explore is no exception.
To buy Bang & Olufsen is to shun the cheapest option on the market – know that now. The Danish audio specialist’s niche is the high-end, premium, aspirational kit that brings with it a certain pride of ownership. That being said, the Beosound Explore is actually the cheaper of B&O’s two most notable portable speakers (the excellent Beosound A1 2nd Generation is $250 / £199; the Explore is $199 / £169) and it is arguably the more outdoor friendly of the two, with a longer battery life (27 hours versus 18 hours), Bluetooth 5.2 (versus Bluetooth 5.1), and a marginally more durable build, with a scratch-resistant hard anodised shell.
Like the A1 2nd Gen, it has a handy strap, but it also has a neat little carabiner to lash it onto things, and the ridiculously chic aesthetic really can’t be beaten. Pull this thing from your bag at a picnic and get ready to revel in the oohs and ahs of your friends.
There’s Bang & Olufsen app support too, which opens the gate to various EQ presets as well as the option to link your Spotify account, your iTunes library, Deezer, DLNA streaming from local servers in your household and also your favorite TuneIn radio stations. What it doesn’t do, is offer multi-room audio grouping, because Beosound Explore does not support multi-room, although you can pair two devices at once to share DJ duties – and you could always pair two of them in stereo, to beef up the sound.
That one small issue aside (this is a portable speaker, after all) there’s a lot of detail and expanse here for the size. We might have worried its barrel-like dimensions would make the sound congested, but absolutely not. Our one gripe is the bass. This can be augmented in the app, of course, but it still doesn’t offer quite the same levels of grip and boom as the Beosound A1 2nd Generation – which makes us reach for the marginally more expensive speaker every time.
The Beosound Explore was unveiled in May 2021 and, considering its support for Bluetooth 5.2, the USB-C charging port and fast pairing whatever your source device, it still stands up against the most up-to-the-minute products on the market right now.
B&O products rarely see a discount, but as mentioned earlier, the Beosound Explore is actually the cheaper of B&O’s two portable speakers, namely the splendid Beosound A1 2nd Generation ($250 / £199) and the Explore under review here.
