Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore review 2024: outdoor speaker

All of these things are real B&O products. At the smaller and more portable end of the scale, however, B&O is still a player. With each new release, they make our guide to the best Bluetooth speakers even more beautiful and out of this world, and the Beosound Explore is no exception. Know now that if you buy Bang & Olufsen, you won’t be getting the cheapest option on the market.

The Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore stays true to the company’s style. When you think of B&O, you probably think of futuristic satellite-shaped speakers that you can roll to make louder, high-end hi-fi systems that double as art installations, dark and ominous 8200-watt monolithic speakers with 18 drivers, or TVs that open up like a butterfly’s wings.

The Danish audio expert specialises in high-end, premium, aspirational gear that makes people feel proud to own it. That said, the Beosound Explore is the cheaper of B&O’s two best portable speakers. The excellent Beosound A1 2nd Generation costs $250/£199, while the Explore costs $199/£169.

It is also arguably the more outdoor-friendly of the two, with a longer battery life (27 hours vs. 18 hours), Bluetooth 5.2 (vs. Bluetooth 5.1), and a slightly more durable build with a scratch-resistant hard anodized shell.

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore SPECIFICATIONS

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore review: Design and features

Look at the JBL Flip 6 and then at this beautiful creature. They don’t look anything alike. The B&O product has brutalist angles, cool aluminium, and one of the best B&O-branded metal carabiners we’ve ever seen. It doesn’t have the speakerphone or power bank features of the JBL Charge 5, though, and it costs a little more, so you really do have to put style first, which is fine.

Under the cool case, you’ll find two 1.8-inch full-range drivers powered by two 30-watt Class D amplifiers. It’s a little disappointing to learn that, despite having a Bluetooth 5.2 chipset, your wireless codec support is limited to plain old SBC, which means you can’t use aptX for higher-quality streaming or AptX Low Latency.

The Beosound Explore will take up about as much space in your bag as a travel mug or coke can, but it’s a lot heavier than these things. At 637g with the carabiner, it’s about the same weight as a basketball. It’s reassuringly weighty rather than heavy, but the similarly sized Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 2 weighs only 420g.

The metal body and big battery (which lasts for 27 hours, the most in its class) do make a difference. Rubberized polymer covers the bottom and top plate, which looks great next to the cool metal case. The top plate has the usual buttons for power, pairing, play/pause, and volume adjustments, as well as a small power LED light.

Under the fabric strap is a USB-C port for charging, but there are no other ins or outs. It’s a shame that this strap is too small to slip over our wrist, like you can with the Beosound A1 2nd Gen, but that’s a small problem. You can buy this speaker from its official website.

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore review: Sound quality

The Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore promises good sound quality even if you don’t care about how it looks or how well it’s made. This is because it has two drivers. The Beosound Explore is loud, but not as loud as devices like the UE Boom 3. Still, the tuning of the sound is good, and the placement of the drivers makes for a good soundstage.

For this review, we mostly used the Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore with an iPhone 13 (Review), but I also tested multi-point connectivity with an Android phone. Since the device doesn’t have a microphone, we could only test it by listening to music, watching some YouTube videos, and playing games on my phone.

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore review: Performance

The battery life of the Explore is quite impressive, lasting for 27 hours of wireless playback (at usual volumes). This is more than enough time to take a trip without having to worry about charging the device. In addition, the time involved is ridiculously long at 2 hours for a full charge. The JBL XTreme 2 has a longer playtime of 15 hours compared to the Sonos Roam’s 10 hours.

The internal playback time of the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay A1 (2nd Gen) is between 18 and 24 hours. Therefore, the Beoplay Explore is an excellent portable music player. Unfortunately, the Explore does not support multi-room audio, which means you will need to use separate speakers for each room. However, it allows stereo pairing, making it easy to use the two speakers as part of an outdoor surround sound system.

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore review: Connectivity

The Explore only has Bluetooth 5.2 for connectivity, and pairing it with other devices is usually very easy. There isn’t a 3.5mm input for older devices, but that’s not a big deal. The Explore also doesn’t have a microphone, so you can’t use it to answer calls.

Got a friend who’s also brought along their Explore? Then, if you want stereo sound, you can connect both of them together. You can also connect up to two devices to the Explore at once, which makes it easy to play music from different sources.

Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore review: Price and release date

Explore first appeared in May of 2021 and retails for £169/$199. That’s a lot to pay for a portable speaker, but the Ultimate Ears Wonderboom 2, which is about the same size and costs around £90/$100, has dominated this market for a while.

But now it’s a different era. Both the Sonos Roam and the JBL Charge 5 exceed the £150/$150 barrier in their pursuit of high-quality sound in a portable compact, and given B&O’s heritage, that is exactly where it should be aiming. Therefore, it has those qualities.

Final Words

An impressive outdoor speaker from the luxury brand Bang & Olufsen, the Beosound Explore was the subject of this review. The Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore is a Bluetooth speaker with a fantastic battery life, great audio, and a premium build; it is an outdoor speaker for those who are both tech-heads and style-conscious.

FAQs

Is Beosound Explore worth it?

The Beosound Explore was introduced in May 2021, and despite the fact that it does not support Bluetooth 5.2, does not have a USB-C charging port, and does not support fast pairing regardless of the source device, it is still competitive with the most cutting-edge products that are currently available on the market.

Is B&O audio better than Bose?

The Bang & Olufsen Beosound Stage is a soundbar, but the Bose Smart Soundbar 700 is a soundbar that is superior to it. The Bose has a sound profile that is more evenly distributed, and it also has a room correction feature that can automatically adapt the sound profile to the specific acoustics of the room.

What country is B&O speaker made?

Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen moved their work from the Olufsen family farm in northwest Denmark, where it had been done up until that point, into a factory in the nearby town of Struer. This occurred a couple of years after the initial release of the Eliminator. Today, the majority of B&O’s manufacturing operations are still housed within these facilities.